Early American Literature

It's prize season at EAL and we have lots to report!

The Early American Literature Book Prize for 2022 has been awarded to Wendy Raphael Roberts, Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, for Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. A full statement regarding this award can be found on page 317 of this issue. Congratulations, Professor Roberts!

The Modern Language Association Forum on Early American Literature has awarded the 2021 Richard Beale Davis prize for the best essay to appear in Early American Literature in that year to Stacey Dearing, Teaching Assistant Professor of English at Siena College, for "Remembering Dorothy May Bradford's Death and Reframing 'Depression' in Colonial New England" (vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 75–104). A full statement regarding this award can be found on page 319 of this issue. Congratulations, Professor Dearing!

The American Literature Society has awarded the 1921 Prize for best essay in any field of American literature (untenured category, cowinner) to Camille S. Owens, PhD candidate in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University, for "'I, Young in Life': Phillis Wheatley and the Invention of American Childhood," which appeared in the special issue coedited by Tara A. Bynum, Brigitte Fielder, and Cassander L. Smith titled "'Dear Sister': Phillis Wheatley's Futures" (vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 727–49). Congratulations, Camille S. Owens!

In further developments at Early American Literature, our anonymous demographic questionnaire is now live. The questionnaire was created by myself and the next journal editors, Cassander L. Smith and Katy Chiles, as well as our Assistant Editor, Alex Gergely. Many people worked on it, including members of our Editorial Board, the MLA Forum on Early American Literature, and the Society of Early Americanists Council of Officers. Authors who submit essays to the journal will now receive an automatic invitation to fill out the questionnaire. Completion of the questionnaire has absolutely no bearing on the review of the submission, and data is only collected in the aggregate, without reference to individual submissions. The [End Page 321] goal of this questionnaire is to gather anonymized data about scholars who submit to this journal in order to make EAL as equitable as possible by enacting antiracist, inclusive practices in our submission process.

And now to a brief commentary on the contents of this issue. A useful keyword linking the essays published in volume 58, no. 2, comes from one essay: Rochelle Raineri Zuck's "William Apess's Indian Nullification: Narrating Mashpee Wampanoag Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century America and Beyond" (395–422). The term is "transformative practice" (395). For Zuck, the concept of "nullification" as practiced in William Apess's treatise can be characterized as a transformative practice because it offers authors and readers an alternative means to exert claims not recognized in treaties or other official mechanisms of white settler colonialism. As such, Apess's account reappropriates mechanisms such as the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution to "leverage new political possibilities" for the Mashpee Wampanoags (395).

In Jennifer Putzi's "Charity Bryant and the Queer Affordances of the Early American Acrostic," the overlooked genre of acrostic poetry becomes the site of another transformative practice by means of its "queer affordances" (363). As employed in the context of early American women's same-sex relationships—represented by Charity Bryant, her partner Sylvia Drake, and a wider circle of women engaged in the circulation of manuscripts—these affordances occur through "composition and circulation practices" that "refuse the isolation of the female subject in the heterosexual pair" (363). The acrostics Putzi discusses "normalize same-sex relationships, making them legible and preserving them for posterity" (363).

In "How Is a Rebus Like a Time Machine?," "Archives" contributor Paul Lewis attends to another such overlooked form: rebuses, or "puzzle poems," and in particular "orphan rebuses" that went unsolved in their own time (425). Lewis draws his material from the poems anthologized in The Citizen Poets of Boston: A Collection of Forgotten Poems, 1789–1820 (ed. Lewis, UP of New England, 2016). This is Lewis's second Early American Literature Archives essay based on the Boston Poems Project, the work...