The Birth-Mark ─ Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History

Susan Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where eachtext is a wilderness in which a strange lawless author 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 insights, fierce and original, are rooted in her seminal textural scholarship in examination of their editorial histories of landmark works. In the process, Howe uproots settled institutionalized roles of men and women as well as of poetry and prose.