Towards a Transatlantic Aesthetic: Immigration, Translation, and Mourning in the Seventeenth Century by Joanne van der Woude

This dissertation, completed in 2007, is extremely successful on many counts: the book based on it is under full review at the Harvard and Chicago University presses, Dr. Van der Woude is an an assistant professor at Harvard, and the dissertation itself identifies and then fills several gaps in the critical conversation surrounding the Puritans and early American culture and literature. This dissertation takes as its central problem what van der Woude sees as a lacuna in current scholarship: it simply doesn’t account for the immigrant experience, the multi-lingual nature of early European settlement in North America, a true Transatlantic perspective, or Native roles in shaping colonial aesthetics. The central problem was easy to find: it’s located very near the beginning of the introduction and this dissertation does a good job of keeping its central problem in mind. After the introductory chapter, which lays out the methodology and begins to work on some of the theoretical questions, the dissertation moves into six chapters that focus on a variety of different genres to explore Early American aesthetics of telling (confessional, conversion, and captivity narratives), singing (prosody and polyglot harmony), and mourning (elegies). While all the chapters work together well, this dissertation is definitely on the bulky side. It’s also uneven bulk in some ways: the mourning section feels particularly underdeveloped. I suspect I’m not the only one with that feeling, since the book prospectus which Dr. Van der Woude has posted online redistributes the chapters so that there are two on each of her sections, cutting one from the telling portion (one that was geographically isolated from the rest of the dissertation) and adding one to the mourning portion. Another deficiency presumably addressed in the book is the dissertation’s lack of a conclusion. In the book, there’s an epilogue which compares the American colonial experience to Dutch-Koisan interactions in South Africa. In addition to the book, she’s gotten two articles and eight presentations out of parts of this material. Generally speaking, though, as an Americanist, I find this to be a lucid and engaging presentation of a compelling argument. I think the close readings are done attentively, and then intelligently situated in a colonial context that gives her work relevance beyond its immediate scope.