The Early American Women Writers series offers rare works of fiction by eighteeth- and nineteenth-century women, each reprinted it its entirety, each with a foreword by General Editor Cathy N. Davidson, who places the novel in a historical and literary perspective. Ranging from serious cautionary tales about moral corruption to amusing and trenchant social satire, these books provide today's reader with a unique window into the earliest American popular fiction and way of life.

Written in 1822, A New-England Tale is the first of Catherine Sedgwick's twenty novels in addition to the one hundred short magazine pieces she published in her lifetime. The story of an orphan girl in rural New England and the moral and religious trials she faces as she grows up, this intriguing portrait provides a unique look at the religious and political climate of this crucial period in America's development as a country. Addressing many of the complex religious, political, and philosophical issues of the time, as well as theoretical issues of the woman writer, A New-England Tale is a classic nineteenth-century story of a young woman's moral and material triumphs.

Learning to Become Turkmen examines the ways in which the iconography of everyday life-in dramatically different alphabets, multiple languages, and shifting education policies-reflects the evolution of Turkmen society in Central Asia over the past century. As Victoria Clement shows, the formal structures of the Russian imperial state did not affect Turkmen cultural formations nearly as much as Russian language and Cyrillic script. Their departure was also as transformative to Turkmen politics and society as their arrival. Complemented by extensive fieldwork, Learning to Become Turkmen is the first book in a Western language to draw on Turkmen archives, as it explores how Eurasia has been shaped historically. Revealing particular ways that Central Asians relate to the rest of the world, this study traces how Turkmen consciously used language and pedagogy to position themselves within global communities such as the Russian/Soviet Empire, the Turkic cultural continuum, and the greater Muslim world.