Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Some of the most meaningful moments in early American literature relied on historical patterns of gift exchange, David Faflik argues in this compelling book. Gift exchange kept a surprising variety of literary objects in circulation across the diverse societies, economies, and cultures of the Americas, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.
From the gifting of a Narragansett grammar as a foundational event in the project of colonization in New England, to the use of Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack in the classrooms of an independent Brazil, to Catharine Maria Sedgwick's fictions framing literature as the object of middle-class gifting, chapters offer an interdisciplinary perspective on book history and literary history in the United States and beyond. Faflik contends that it is because of the wild ways in which books circulated as gifts that works by Franklin, New England colonist Roger Williams, Sedgwick, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson resisted the generic conventions of their day. Offering a revisionist account of how literary meaning is made, The Literary Gift in Early America calls for closer attention to the historical patterns of literary give and take in the Americas.
"This is an elegant, insightful, innovative, and sustained argument for the importance of gifting as a foundational circulatory mode for literature before modernism. Gifting, far from being a more satisfying economy apart from capitalist exchanges, emerges as complicated and fraught." —Eliza Richards, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"A generative field of scholarship within early American literary studies illuminates the mobility and circulation of texts—tracking how they moved through hands and households, across networks and geographies, abetted by infrastructures, and embedded within social rituals of exchange. David Faflik's The Literary Gift in Early America is a lucid and ambitious contribution to this field, and especially attends to the social circumstances and cultural effects of textual circulation." —Christy L. Pottroff, William and Mary Quarterly
"The Literary Gift in Early America is an interesting study that emphasizes the importance of gift exchange in shaping early American literature and its meanings.... Faflik does a wonderful job in combining the work of the chosen authors and using their work to show that early American literature was intertwined with the cultures of gifting and reflected broader social practices. The book is a good read for students of literature or history, as well as for the general public." —Kimberly Woodring, H-History-and-Theory
"This expansive and dynamic study is a gift to anyone interested in the extraordinary range of modes by which textual objects were transmitted, received, and exchanged in early America.... Highly recommended." —A. T. Hale, Choice
Introduction
1. Roger Williams's Key to the Literatures of Colonial Exchange
2. Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Gift Diplomacy
3. Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Distributional Redundancies
4. Walt Whitman and the Poetry of Presence
5. Emily Dickinson and the Futures of the Gift
Notes
Bibliography
Index