Jerome McGann begins his book with an observation about his mostly seventeenth-century Anglo-American archive that isn’t exactly new but, in his treatment, becomes a little more interesting than usual, both for early Americanists and for literary studies more broadly. The texts that we’ve inherited in this field are of a more “‘practical’ character” (3) than most texts that preoccupy literary criticism, literary history, or even cultural criticism. This claim is especially significant given the book’s particular relationship to canonicity. It would be easy, though incorrect, to say, after looking at McGann’s table of contents, that his selection of texts was simply a walk-through of the last few editions of a Norton anthology’s table of contents. Here William Bradford leads to John Winthrop leads to Anne Bradstreet leads to Cotton Mather, then Benjamin Franklin, then Thomas Jefferson. But along the way in this book, McGann produces impressive readings of texts that...

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