Description
Book SynopsisThe stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies'' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis—both experiential and existential—at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed.
Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catas
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"Seasons of Misery is a smart, provocative work that belongs on the bookshelf of scholars working in the fields of seventeenth-century Anglo-American history, literature, and culture, as well as scholars interested in the cultural history of violence." * American Historical Review *
"Donegan rightly calls attention to the tenuous nature of early English colonization efforts, highlighting the violence, deprivation, and contingency that marked efforts to establish permanent colonies. Her perceptive reading of texts offers many rewards, not least of which is a rich sense of how disoriented early colonists were by the catastrophes they confronted-and often created-in the novel social and physical circumstances of the New World." * Reviews in American History *
"Seasons of Misery . . . not only recovers texts or textual episodes that historians and literary critics alike seldom read or integrate into studies of early America, but it offers new ways of narrating American literary and cultural history." * Early American Literature *
"A provocative and remarkably original contribution that considers the agony of settlement in early America. Donegan writes so beautifully that readers might miss the audacity and innovation of her argument." * Jill Lepore, Harvard University *
"Harrowing, moving, and revelatory, Seasons of Misery offers up a new and unfamiliar vision of the settlement of early America-one that tells of unsettlement and trauma at the heart of the experience of early colonialism and encounter. In stunning prose, Donegan opens a heretofore unseen space in narratives of early America and the field of early American studies." * Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University *
"Elegantly written and persuasively argued, Seasons of Misery provides sophisticated close readings of the early historical eyewitness accounts of English settlements in the New World." * Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland *
Table of Contents
Introduction: Unsettlement
Chapter 1. Roanoke: Left in Virginia
Chapter 2. Jamestown: Things That Seemed Incredible
Chapter 3. Plymouth: Scarce Able to Bury Their Dead
Chapter 4. Barbados: Wild Extravagance
Afterword: Standing Half-Amazed
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
