("The Echo" is an ongoing review of current critical writings on American literature, 1770-1830, commencing on this occasion with 1999.)

n "'Talking Too Much English': Languages of Economy and Politics in Equiano's The Interesting Narrative" (Early American Literature 34[99]:263-82), Tanya Caldweli concludes that Equiano's Narrative is "permeated by the economic and political imperatives and strictures of late eighteenth-century Britain." Equiano recognizes the danger of being read as an autonomous individual advocating change from Britain's past, and instead writes within a tradition of civic humanism and Homo economicus that explains his affirmation of his own "whiteness" and his hope at the end that Africa will be opened to the British empire. Kirsten Wilcox, in "The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley" (American Literature 71[99]: 1-29), is interested in tensions in Wheatley's poetry: marketing strategies, which in Boston emphasized the poems' local significance and in London emphasized the poet's novelty; and the public sphere, which permitted Wheatley to speak in London, but denied her subjectivity at the same time.

Katherine Clay Bassard, in Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing (Princeton U. P., 99), studies Wheatley in the context of a community of writers that includes Ann Plato, Jarena Lee, and Rebecca Cox Jackson, all of whom-write themselves as subjects in their intertextual interrogations of God, man, and society. Bassard reads these writings through a "spirituals matrix" which encodes the problematics of representation, performativity, and origins. Wheatley's many elegies, for example, bring into focus a central facet of her diasporic existence, that is, "the desire to speak beyond the grave, of separation from those she left behind for a better, world." Looking into printed advertisements for runaway slaves, David Waldstreicher in "Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic" (William & Mary Q. 56[99]: 243-72) argues that 18th-century runaway slaves were often confidence men, and that slave advertisements tried to counter that fact by bolstering the public's confidence in slavery. These advertisements reveal a complicated rhetorical exchange, in which white men tried to re-embody their runaway slaves and runaway slaves tried to self-fashion themselves to elude detection.

John Saillant is interested in how black men were sentimentalized and eroticized in the early Republic. In "The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic 1790-1820" (in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler [U. of California P., 99, pp. 89-11 1), he argues that while some republicans attempted to expatriate the body they eroticized, others represented intimacy between

black men and white men in homoerotic and benevolent terms. Daniel A. Cohen, in "Social Injustice, Sexual Violence, Spiritual Transcendence: Constructions of Interracial Rape in Early American Crime Literature" (William & Mary Q. 56 [991: 481-526) looks at the emergence of racist and proto-racist images in crime literature. The content of these crime narratives is less racist or proto-racist than we have imagined, he argues, but it nevertheless played a role in popularizing hostile stereotypes that emerge as the evangelicallspiritual understanding of human nature gives way to liberalism.

Gordon Sayre investigates racism from the point of view of a single author, John Tanner. In "Abridging Between Two Worlds: John Tanner as American Indian Autobiographer" (American Literary History II [99]: 480-99), Sayre claims that Tanner discards essentialist notions of racial identity in favor of a model of "belonging" that he derives from Native American kinship structures. Because of this, he suggests, Tanner's Narrative (1830) has been poorly received: readers cannot find an "essential" Indian voice or quality in the narrative.

James V. Lynch is interested in Thomas Paine's attitude toward slavery. In "The Limits of Revolutionary Radicalism: Tom Paine and Slavery" (Pennsylvania Magazine of Hist. & Biog. 123[99]: 177-199), Lynch argues that Paine's public abolitionist reputation is unwarranted and historically inaccurate. Misreadings, misattributions, and carelessness have contributed to Paine's reputation as an early abolitionist (and feminist). Edward Larkin, in "'Could the Wolf Bleat Like the Lamb': Thomas Paine's Critique and the Early American Public Sphere" (Arizona Q. 55[991: 1-37), critiques Paine's use of the public sphere. In Common Sense, he suggests, Paine adopts the language of the public sphere, but he later comes to see that "measures" must be attacked in part by taking the "characters" of men into account-a strategy that undermines a basic assumption of the public sphere and one that is turned against him by others.

The intersection of the public sphere, print capitalism, republicanism, emergent liberalism, and nationalism was the focus of a cluster of articles in 1999. In "The Forgotten Publius: John Jay and the Aesthetics of Ratification" (Early American Literature 34[99]: 223-40), Robert Ferguson studies Jay's early contri- butions to The Federalist (#2-#5) and argues that they offer a subtle but compelling "aesthetics of ratification." Jay maneuvers his audience into a "choice" between an aesthetically pleasing union and an ugly, inefficient confederation. Edward White, in "Urbane Bifocals: The Federalist Sociology of Franklin's Autobiography (American Literary History 11 [99]: 1-33), argues that Franklin's persona in the Autobiography is not a self-made man, but a partisan of an emergent Federalist sociology. The narrative inculcates an urban, capitalist order and dismisses backcountry, agrarian democracy.

Martin Brückner argues that, after the Revolution, Americans turned to the "discourse of geography" to negotiate and transform the representation of "personal, regional, and political difference into material figures of national consent." In "Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic" (American Q. 51[99]: 311-43), Brückner shows that the widespread diffusion of geographic literature beginning in the 1790s connected former colonial subjects in a new imagined community. Glynis Ridley, in "The First American Cookbook" (Eighteetith-Century Life 23[99]: 1 14-23), claims that Amelia Simmons' Ameyican Cookery (I 796) articulates an overt anti-British statement which celebrates an emergent American nationalism. Gillian Brown studies early American quixotes in the 1790s and beyond, and concludes that characters who confuse life with fiction serve as a way for early American writers to emphasize the consent necessary in a republic. In "The Quixotic Fallacy" (Novel 32[991: 250-74), she says that quixotism "strengthens the force of social mimeticism, demonstrating that the social drive to mimeticism outruns and overtakes even the most erratic courses an individual can pursue."

Adam Potkay looks at rhetoric more traditional and broadly in "Theorizing Civic Eloquence in the Early Republic: The Road from David Hume to John Quincy Adams" (Early American Literature 34[991: 147-70). He argues that the classical theory of civic eloquence enters America via Hume, thrives in the early national period, and is displaced by 1819 by a romantic and domestic ideology that locates true stability outside the realm of politics (where classical republican theory had found it). William Dowling sees a transformation in political discourse occurring at the same time. In Literary Federalist in the Age of Jefferson (U of South Carolina P, 99), he studies Joseph Dennie's The Portfolio (1810-1811) and argues that it enacts a Federalist retreat from history into the sanctuary of literary or aesthetic consciousness. Jeffersonianism represents a money or market society for Dennie, and--his criticisms unheeded--he and other Federalists retreat into a "world elsewhere" in response. Leon Jackson, in "Jedidiah Morse and the Transformation of Print Culture in New England, 1784-1826" (Early American Literature 34 [99): 2-31), sees a transformation in print culture in the early national period. Morse adopts the strategies of three different conceptions of printedness in his career, and hence recapitulates the haphazard transition to print capitalism. In "A Poet, A Planter, and a Nation of Farmers" (Jr. of the Early Republic 19 [99]: 1-14), Richard Bushman looks closely at competing images of republican farmers in the early national period, finding in Timothy Dwight's Greenfield Hill and John Taylor's Arator rural visions which depart from Jefferson's vision in Notes on the State of Virginia, and set the stage for later sectional disagreements in newly-created states after 1817.

Two articles look at founding fathers in the early republic and beyond. Robert M. S. McDonald, in "Thomas Jefferson's Changing Reputation as Author of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years" (Journal of the Early Republic 19 [99]: 169-95), claims that the Declaration moves through three phases: statement of consensus, weapon of partisan warfare, and national, nonpartisan eminence. Jefferson's growing reputation as "author" reflects the larger transformation of American public culture, as well as an emergent romantic ideology. Through the lens of Franklin, Carla Mulford studies the ways Ameri- cans have searched for a national culture in "Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Cultural Memory" (New England Q. 72[991: 415-43). Suggesting that nationalism arises from sets of converging circumstances that permit or enable particular versions of the past to become fixed as myth, Mulford looks at the use of Franklin at moments of deep social crisis in the 19th Century.

More ambiguously Scott C. Martin, in "Interpreting Metamora: Nationalism, Theater, and Jacksonian Indian Policy" (Jr. of the Early Republic 19 [99]:73-101),reads Stone's Metamora (1829) against recent, overdetermined criticism that assumes they will find (and do find) a racist agenda or a theatrical imaging of the "other." Martin discovers, instead, that we do not know the specific source of the play's popularity, and that its significance rests in its reflection of broad developments in 19th-century culture--such as the "star" system in the American theater--not in a narrow quest for partisan support or political influence.

Two longer studies complete this cluster of writings. Eric Wertheimer's Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876 (Cambridge UP, 99) argues that the Incas and Aztecs were both resisted and exploited, made and unmade, by writers creating an American national imaginary. Philip Freneau and Joel Barlow use them to project a nativist national imaginary in the early republic, while later writers like Prescott and Whitman problematize and then elide those cultures from their national imaginings. Edward Gray, in New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton UP, 99), traces the emergence of the idea between the 17th and 19th centuries that linguistic difference corresponds to differences in human character. Puritans and French missionaries assumed they could recover a pre-Babel language behind or within native languages, Gray argues, while enlightenment and early-romantic writers come to understand native languages as "barbarous." This turn is both a symptom and cause of U.S. policies toward Native Americans in the early 19th Century.

Another book concerned With the transition from the 18th to the 19th Century is Christoph Irmscher's The Poetics of Natural History: from John Bartram to William James (Rutgers U. P., 99). Irmscher argues that American natural history is written atthe crossroads of Linnean taxonomy and belles lettres, science and imagination, precise description and extended narrative, but that in the end it nearly always falls into autobiography. Nature exists for writers like Bartram, Peale, Audubon, and Barnum to collect, display, and represent, and in their particular responses (texts, museums, paintings, etchings, etc.) they use natural history as a stage for autobiographical self-definition. Darwin, by way of contrast, will deny that "man" is the subject of his own discourse; he is merely one of its objects.

The rhetorical use of language concerns both Michael Krans and Janet M. Anderson. In "Writing for an Elsewhere: Author(ity) and Authenticity in the Texts of the First Franklin Expedition (1819-1822)" (Studies in Canadian Literature 24 99]: 70-92), Krans notes that British explorers on Franklin's expedition to the Arctic performed actions (and wrote) for a world elsewhere. The texts recording the expedition are "inauthentic" because the explorers willfully and destructively chose, in Heideggerian terms, to be inflexible in the face of a new world. With a narrower focus in "Ellen Emerson and the Tubercular Muse" (Literature and Medicine 18 [99]: 39-59), Anderson reads Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson's letters and poems written in her late teens before her death in 1831, and argues that tuberculosis was both a creative catalyst and a dominant metaphor in them. Tuberculosis inspires her, even as it kills her.

The rhetoric of sentimentality interests Bruce Burgett and Philip Gould, whose essays appear in the collection Sentimental Men (cited earlier in reference to John Saillant's essay). Burgett's reprinted essay, "Masochism and Male Sentimentalism: Charles Brockden Brown's Clara Howard'(pp. 205-225), asks why Brown chose to place the sentimental Edward Hartley under the rational authority of Clara Howard. Brown's inversion of developing norms (male/reason, female/sentiment), Burgett argues, provides a "counterpossibility" both to ungendered sentimental citizenship (the enlightenment ideal) and melodramas of beset manhood. Gould, in "Remembering Metacom: Historical Writing and the Cultures of Masculinity in Early Republican America" (pp. 112-124), shows how King Philip or Metacom served as a cultural trope for the complex relations between republicanism and sentimentalism. He is portrayed in the early republic simultaneously as selfless patriot and ambitious demagogue, noble and savage, (ideally) republican and (actually) fated to pass away, masculine and androgynous. He was a site at which larger cultural negotiations over the gendered meaninp,s of republicanism took place.

Gould's article and Scott Martin's (cited earlier) both look at Stone's Metamora. Two other articles look at the early American theater. Randall Fuller examines "Theaters of the American Revolution: The Valley Forge Cato and the Meschianza in their Transcultural Contexts" (Early American Literature 34 [99]: 126-146). Fuller compares the theatrical productions of the American and British troops in May 1778, and argues that deep down the productions shared a normative identity in which racial, sexual, and ethnic others were subordinated in a myth of nationhood. The myths themselves differed, but several fundamental assumptions were shared. T. A. Milford looks at "Boston's Theater Controversy and Liberal Notions of Advantage" (New England Q. 72 [99]: 61-88). The theater controversy in Boston in the early 1790s reveals a moment when a post-war liberal consensus in favor of the theater-and, more broadly, in favor of an open society--emerged in the midst of polemical violence.

While a liberal consensus emerged in Boston, Herman Mann was elsewhere defusing Deborah Sampson's threatening gender transgression. So Judith Hiltner argues in "'She Bled in Secret': Deborah Sampson, Herman Mann, and The Female Review" (Early American Literature 34[991: 190-220). Hiltner shows how Mann disarms Sampson, turning her cross-dressing heroics in the Revolution into an exemplary specimen of republican motherhood by the end of the narrative. However, two other scholars, reading works written 30 years later, show how women writers challenged the cultural consensus about republican motherhood. Hildegaard Hoeller, in "A Quilt for Life: Lydia Maria Child's The Ainerican Frugal Housewife" (American Transcendental Q. 13, ii[99): 89-104), argues that Child's 1829 domestic handbook is actively engaged in renegotiating the boundaries between male and female, public and private, economy and domesticity. The handbook reflects values typical of industrial capitalism, not the moral vision of domestic economy, and in its engagement with the public sphere anticipates Child's 1833 defense of abolition, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Antericans Called Africans. Susanne Opfermann, in "Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick: A Dialogue on Race, Culture, and Gender" (in Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, ed. Karen L. Kilcup [U. of Iowa P., 99], 27-47), argues that Child and Sedgwick were more self-conscious and more liberal on issues of race and gender than Cooper, who was finally blind to some of the implications of his own narratives. Cooper also, Opfermann asserts, went beyond "dialogue" and copied a good bit of the plot of The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829) from Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827).

Several editions close my column. Michael Schuldiner and Daniel J. Kleinfeld have edited The Selected Writings of Mordecai Noah (Greenwood P., 99). Noah (1785-1851), an American Jew, was a playwright, essayist, newspaper-man, and politician in late-national and antebellum America. Schuldiner and Kleinfeld reprint one of his plays and a handful of essays in this hardbound edition. They include a biographical sketch and a selected bibliography. Paul Baepler has edited White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives (U. of Chicago P., 99). Baepler's long introduction surveys the origins and reach of the Barbary captivity narrative, from the late 17th Century to the present. All or part of nine works are reprinted in the volume, which is available in paper or cloth, as is an appendix which compiles the publishing history of a good part of the entire corpus of American Barbary captivity narratives. Finally, Mary Chapman has edited a classroom edition of Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (Broadview P., 99). The 1887 Philadelphia edition is reprinted here, with minimal modernizing, an introduction appropriate for all levels, footnotes, an extensive recommended reading list, and three brief appendices(including J. S. Murray's "On the Equality of the Sexes").

The East India Company is founded.

Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour is published.

John Dryden dies.

John Hale, who inquired into the nature of witchcraft, dies.

Solomon Williams, later the first recipient of a Yale doctoral degree in divinity who also supported the Great Awakening, is born.

Possible birthdate of Richard Lewis, destined to be a poet in Maryland.

William Congeve's The Way of the World is printed.

Samuel Sewell's The Selling of Joseph appears (24 June).

Robert Calef's More Wonders of the Invisible World is published. A public library is established in Charleston.

French fort constructed at Makinac (Michigan) to protect the route from Canada to Louisiana territory.

Roman Catholics required, by the threat of life imprisonment or execution, to leave Massachusetts and New York.