Book Review: Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750-1850: The Indian Atlantic. Edited by Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings. Cambridge University Press, 2009

• Published in: Literature & History Vol. 19; no. 2; p. 101
• Main Author: Noel, Rebecca R
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: London Sage Publications Ltd 01.10.2010
• Subjects: American Indians; Bryant, William Cullen (1794-1878)
• ISSN: 0306-1973; 2050-4594

Intentionally though implicitly, the editors explain, the anthology downplays international borders dividing scholarship on Canada, the United States, and Britain; asks American literature to revise its white, nationalist narrative and find its roots in racially complex colonial experience; pressures British Romantic Studies to include North America, not only the Caribbean and Asia; invites Native American Studies to enter the American scholarly mainstream, allowing cross-racial influence yet remembering conflict and resistance; and encourages continued interpenetrations of historical and literary studies. In essays by Alan Taylor and Ted Binnema, by contrast, Anglo cultural brokers like Sir William Johnson and the fascinating Hudson's Bay Company trader Peter Fidler developed valuably nuanced knowledge of Native groups. Wordsworth's use of Native Americans, in turn, informed William Cullen Bryant's poem 'The Prairies,' a commitment in visible tension with the poem's Jacksonian pro-Indianremoval politics.