![]() The story of a Lost Colony, Donegan explains, “replaces the violence that arose from not knowing with a melancholy arising from loss it disavows a history of failed colonization through a mystery about wandering off into the woods.” Yet in revealing the function of this legend and its mismatch with experience, Donegan seems motivated, in part, by a desire to unmask the myth. What gets lost in the myth of a Lost Colony is the terror of a people who were abandoned yet again in one more failed English attempt at settlement. In separating out those first years of settlement from later representations of them, are we interested in what David Shields celebrates: “an early American literature that does away with genealogy”? Or are we in fact still interested in genealogy, guided into the study by misguided genealogies in order to rewrite the story at its start? The Lost Colony, as Donegan demonstrates, is a nice tale we have come to tell that mythologizes and disembodies the misery of the actual experience, making it palatable for a modern audience. There are two questions I’d like to raise from this account for further discussion. What we see in Donegan’s book is story after story of bewildering confusion and death. And in so many cases, the result of so much disorientation and incoherence was a suffering that resulted from, and produced, violence and a violence that led to further suffering. Donegan dwells in the incoherence of Jamestown because it is precisely that lack of coherence which signaled the new formation of colonial (not American) identity. Becoming colonial, Donegan shows, is a process of loss with very little gain it is the disorientation of no longer being English, but not necessarily the new orientation of being something else either. In the absence of a story leading from the past to the present, what kind of questions can emerge? For Donegan, the key question is not how settlers became American, but rather how they became colonial. It was the sixth trip to North Carolina that led to the Lost Colony, and all the other attempts failed as well. Origins matter in Donegan’s work as well, but in a much different way: not because they lead to something else, but because they so often lead nowhere at all. Such work focused primarily on genealogical narratives: origins mattered because they led to today. The Puritans had always been the prime culprit here with Errand into the Wilderness, Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Puritan Origins of the American Self, and so on. In particular, scholars separated their subject matter from the question of Americanization. Perhaps it had been building for some time, but around 1990 several scholars began more explicitly detaching early America from longer narratives of American literary history. His review marked a dramatic shift in early American literature. In a review of several works, he called for and celebrated scholarship that focused on early America without any desire to move beyond it-scholarship that cared about early America on its own and did not treat it as merely the beginning of a better, more interesting, more aesthetically pleasing and intellectually compelling literature or culture that came later. Miller, as we all know, sought a clear narrative, a comprehensive and coherent legacy, a way to say that early America laid the foundations for the predicaments and possibilities we have today.įour decades later, David Shields suggested a different sort of project. The first comes from the famous preface of Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness, where he dismisses Jamestown for lacking coherence-a settlement that cannot serve his purpose as a point of origin for “America” and therefore gets sidelined for a narrative that begins instead with the Puritans in Boston. Let me open those framing questions with two particular moments. And all of my questions that follow really amount to just this: How do we think about early American legacies today? And should we be thinking about them at all? I’d like to begin with that comment because we are not meant to fawn in this colloquy we are meant to open up questions for discussion.
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