The essays in this collection examine the connections between the forces of empire and women's lives in the early Americas, in particular the ways their narratives contributed to empire formation. Focusing on the female body as a site of contestation, the essays describe acts of bravery, subversion, and survival expressed in a variety of genres, including the saga, letter, diary, captivity narrative, travel narrative, verse, sentimental novel, and autobiography. The volume also speaks to a range of female experience, across the Americas and across time, from the Viking exploration to early nineteenth-century United States, challenging scholars to reflect on the implications of early American literature even to the present day.

"This collection foregrounds an astoundingly diverse array of writing by and about women from the transatlantic and hemispheric Americas, documenting how womenincluding servants and shop-keepers, mystics and midwives, captives and converts, loyalists and criminalssituated themselves in relation to their changing worlds and served as agents and adversaries of colonization. Four decades after Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land, this collection charts new paths for understanding the symbolic power of women's bodies and the significance of women's writing to the work of colonization." - Jodi Schorb, Associate Professor of English, University of Florida, USA

"The essays in this collection skillfully incorporate a diverse body of recent scholarly emphasesempire, gender, corporality, and spatiality, to name a fewto offer a compelling and exciting new way of understanding the emergence, entrenchment, and continuing reinvention of empire throughout the early Americas. Anyone who studies any of the multitudes of cultural systems operating across early America should read these eye-opening essays." - Jim Egan, Professor of English, Brown University, USA

"A major contribution to historical and literary studies, these sixteen essays about women's engagement with and critique of empire building in the Americas should lay the foundation for an extended discussion of women and empire. The book's array of texts, time periods, and topics willmake it the go-to book on the subject for years to come. Since it ranges so widely on so many fronts, I can envision designing an entire class around the topic and using many of the texts under discussion as primary sources supplemented by these essays." - Scott Slawinski, Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies, Western Michigan University, USA

Autorentext
Mary McAleer Balkun is Professor of English at Seton Hall University, USA. She is the author of The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture and an associate editor of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry .

Susan C. Imbarrato is Professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA. She is the author of Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America and a past President of the Society of Early Americanists.

Inhalt
Preface; Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato
Introduction; Marion Rust

1. Gudrid Thorbjornsdöttir: First Foremother of American Empire; Annette Kolodny
2. Ungendering Empire: Catalina de Erauso and the Performance of Masculinity; Cathy Rex
3. Creole Civic Pride and Positioning "Exceptional" Black Women; Joan Bristol and Tamara Harvey
4. Imposing Order: Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal and the Anglo-American Empire; Ann M. Brunjes
5. The Midwife's Calling: Martha Ballard's Diary and the Empire of Medical Knowledge in the Early Republic; Thomas Lawrence Long
6. The Birth Pangs of the American Mother: Puritanism, Republicanism, and the Letter-Journal of Esther Edwards Burr; Samantha Cohen Tamulis
7. Empire and the Pan-Atlantic Self in The Female American; or, the Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield; Denise Mary MacNeil
8. 'The Fever and the Fetters': An Epidemiology of Captivity and Empire; Sarah Schuetze
9. Women Left Behind: Female Loyalism, Coverture, and Grace Growden Galloway's Empire of Self; Kacy Dowd Tillman
10. 'Solitary, Neglected, Despised': Cruel Optimism and National Sentimentality; Astrid M. Fellner and Susanne Hamscha
11. The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement; Brigitte Fielder
12. New World Roots: Transatlantic Fictions, Creole Marriages, and Women's Cultivation of Empire in the Americas;Rochelle Raineri Zuck
13. Catharine Brown's Body: Missionary Spiritualization and Cherokee Embodiment; Theresa Strouth Gaul
14. Territorial Agency: Negotiations of Space and Empire in the Domestic Violence Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey and Anne Home Livingston; Lisa M. Logan
15. 'Her Book the Only Hope She Had': Self and Sovereignty in the Narratives of Ann Carson; Dan Williams
16. Bodies of Work: Early American Women Writers, Empire, and Pedagogy; Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola