The book begins with the first colonization of the Americas and stretches beyond the Revolution to the early national period. Placing the literary culture of the settlements in the context of other colonies as well as the growing cosmopolitan culture of the British empire itself, this lively reader contains numerous dialogues across the English Atlantic world. The English Literatures of America offers a wide range of voices, including women writers on both sides of the ocean, early English-language texts of Native Americans, and writings of Africans both slave and free, in London as well as in the American colonies. It includes texts from elite as well as common cultures, Puritans in New England as well as Puritans in the West Indies, regional cultures in the colonial South as well as the grand cosmopolitan culture of imperial London. The organization of The English Literatures of America involves a thorough rethinking of colonial American literature that, while retaining the standards of the American canon, places them in a new light.
American literatures are for the first time presented in an international and colonial context.
The Puritans can be read as they understood themselves, i.e., as New English. Many texts are collected here for the first time in any anthology. Here, for example, are Francis Bacon, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope and Adam Smith, as well as Bradstreet, Wheatley, Edwards and Franklin. Despite the unparalleled scope of this anthology, many texts are given complete rather than in snippets. These include Hariot's Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Aphra Behn's play the Widow Ranter, numerous essays by Benjamin Franklin and others.