THE BIRTH

Susan Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where eachtext is a wilderness in which a strange lawless a uthor confronts interpreters, professors, and editors eager for settlement. Howe approaches Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville and Emily Dickinson as a fellow writer?as a poet and feminist as much as a critic: her insight s, fierce and original, are rooted in her seminal textural scholarship in examination of their editorial histories of landmark works . In the...[Read more]