Describing Early America

"Regis offers a valuable and challenging revision of contemporary understanding of her subjects' literary purposes and the place of these texts in American literary history." (American Literature) "So much has been written about Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, William Bartram's Travels, and St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer that one might suppose that nothing new could be said about them. Yet, drawing on modes of analysis supplied by writers as diverse as Edmund Burke, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz, Pamela Regis has constructed an interpretive context which views these well-known texts from a new perspective." (Times Higher Education Supplement)