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This volume illustrates the significance of epistolarity as a
literary phenomenon intricately interwoven with eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century cultural developments. Rejecting the common
categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this
collection of essays demonstrates the genre's persistent public
engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary,
early republican, and antebellum eras. Sections of the collection
treat letters' implication in transatlanticism, authorship, and
reform movements as well as the politics and practices of editing
letters. The wide range of authors considered include Mercy Otis
Warren, Charles Brockden Brown, members of the Emerson and Peabody
families, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stoddard, Catherine Brown,
John Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. The volume is particularly relevant
for researchers in U.S. literature and history, as well as women's
writing and periodical studies. This dynamic collection offers
scholars an exemplary template of new approaches for exploring an
understudied yet critically important literary genre.
When nineteen-year-old Harriett Gold, from a prominent white family
in Cornwall, Connecticut, announced in 1825 her intention to marry
a Cherokee man, her shocked family initiated a spirited
correspondence debating her decision to marry an Indian.
Eventually, Gold's family members reconciled themselves to her
wishes, and she married Elias Boudinot in 1826. After the marriage,
she returned with Boudinot to the Cherokee Nation, where he went on
to become a controversial political figure and editor of the first
Native American newspaper. Providing rare firsthand documentation
of race relations in the early nineteenth-century United States,
this volume collects the Gold family correspondence during the
engagement period as well as letters the young couple sent to the
family describing their experiences in New Echota (capital of the
Cherokee Nation) during the years prior to the Cherokee Removal. In
an introduction providing historical and social contexts, Theresa
Strouth Gaul offers a literary reading of the correspondence,
highlighting the value of the epistolary form and the gender and
racial dynamics of the exchange. As Gaul demonstrates, the
correspondence provides a factual accompaniment to the many
fictionalized accounts of contacts between Native Americans and
Euroamericans and supports an increasing recognition that letters
form an important category of literature.
Catharine Brown (1800?-1823) became Brainerd Mission School's first
Cherokee convert to Christianity, a missionary teacher, and the
first Native American woman whose own writings saw extensive
publication in her lifetime. After her death from tuberculosis at
age twenty-three, the missionary organization that had educated and
later employed Brown commissioned a posthumous biography, Memoir of
Catharine Brown, which enjoyed widespread contemporary popularity
and praise. In the following decade, her writings, along with those
of other educated Cherokees, became highly politicized and were
used in debates about the removal of the Cherokees and other tribes
to Indian Territory. Although she was once viewed by literary
critics as a docile and dominated victim of missionaries who
represented the tragic fate of Indians who abandoned their
identities, Brown is now being reconsidered as a figure of enduring
Cherokee revitalization, survival, adaptability, and leadership. In
Cherokee Sister Theresa Strouth Gaul collects all of Brown's
writings, consisting of letters and a diary, some appearing in
print for the first time, as well as Brown's biography and a drama
and poems about her. This edition of Brown's collected works and
related materials firmly establishes her place in early
nineteenth-century culture and her influence on American
perceptions of Native Americans.
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