Last Spring, in Dr. Lisa Vetere’s course, The Cultural Work of Early American Texts, I wrote my seminar paper on Susanna Rowson’s 1794 novel Charlotte Temple.
I was not terribly enthused with the primary texts in this course to be honest: “it just isn’t my thing;” however, the secondary and theoretical texts for this class were AWESOME. (This is a common experience for me.) I picked Charlotte Temple as my primary text for two very basic reasons: 1. It is a novel rather than a travel account, captivity narrative, autobiography, etc.; 2. The amount of existing criticism was substantial enough to give me something to work with, but not too overwhelming to negate the possibility of my being able to read and address it in the time and page #’s I had available to me.
Though it caused me a few headaches, I am pretty pleased with the result. Although there is neither quite enough theoretical muscle nor enough historical information to completely sustain the argument, for a seminar paper, it works because it identifies a formal element of the text, the analepses, which has not been addressed in criticism, and posits a social, historical and formal importance for that feature.
So, my first posted paper is “With Friends Like These: Authority and Analepsis in Charlotte Temple.” CHARLOTTE.DOC
* Papers posted on the blog, will also be added to the “Graduate Work” page*
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