Of Compass Bearings and Reorientations in the Study of American Women Writers

In the process, I will also ask what I hope will be productive questions - about the locations and boundaries of America, about how gender still silently determines the canon of American literature, and about the limited vision that results from our class- and race-based privileging of printed, alphabetic texts. Because A Narrative of the Shipwreck saw multiple editions within two years, it seems plausible that it had a large circulation, even if it did not remain in print after the early nineteenth century.