Unscripted America

Features

• Offers wealth of new archival sources of American Indian language texts
• Provides new account of the impact of Euro-indigenous language encounters on philosophy, religion, and literature
• Demonstrates centrality of the occluded figure of the Indian in American literary history
• Argues that the knowledge exchanged between Europeans and indigenous populations transformed understandings of language

About the Author(s)

Sarah Rivett is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University and the author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (UNC Press, 2011), which won the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History.

Reviews

"Rivett's interventions are as numerous as her readings and also affect Native studies. It is especially her side by side readings of French and English sources that both respond to a long-identified need for multilingual work in early American studies and do so inways that are simultaneously rigorous and innovative." -- Joanne van der Woude, The New England Quarterly

"Unscripted America is a meaningful contribution to a surge in scholarship that has explored the relation between intellectual history, Native studies, and the literary history of colonial America and the early US republic. Its focus on the scientific study of indigenous languages makes it particularly worth reading ... Rivett offers a scrupulously detailed study of the cultural history of the colonial Americas, a simultaneously wide-ranging and deeply probing account of the linguistic exchanges at the heart of colonial encounter. Making thought-provoking connections between linguistic and theological writings and the literatures of the early republic, Unscripted America is an indispensable text for scholars examining the history of cultural exchange in Native North America." -- Frank Kelderman, H-Net

"Unscripted America is an enthralling work of cultural history that brings together early American literature, theology, and indigenous studies in original ways ... Rivett's scholarly achievements in Unscripted America are many and meaningful." -- Daniel Dewispelare, Notes and Queries

"This book is an account of encounter and (dis)encounter. Coming from the field of literary history [...] the author's study of the missionary linguistics of colonial North America deserves our attention because, reading beyond the lines, it is not just about the history. The problems of mistranslation, misinterpretation, and appropriation discussed by the author are faced by all field researchers working in indigenous communities today." --International Journal of American Linguistics

"Unscripted America is a meaningful contribution to a surge in scholarship that has explored the relation between intellectual history, Native studies, and the literary history of colonial America and the early US republic. Its focus on the scientific study of indigenous languages makes it particularly worth reading [...] Making thought-provoking connections between linguistic and theological writings and the literatures of the early republic, Unscripted America is an indispensable text for scholars examining the history of cultural exchange in Native North America." --H-Net

"This book is an account of encounter and (dis)encounter. Coming from the field of literary history [...] the author's study of the missionary linguistics of colonial North America deserves our attention because, reading beyond the lines, it is not just about the history. The problems of mistranslation, misinterpretation, and appropriation discussed by the author are faced by all field researchers working in indigenous communities today." --International Journal of American Linguistics

"Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries." --E. J. Vajda, CHOICE

"A rich intellectual and literary history, Rivett's Unscripted America makes a highly original argument about the role of indigenous languages in the formation of early American literature. The book places at the center of its story the Native interlocutors who spoke, translated, and explained their languages to Europeans, and it shows how they actively shaped the written record that sought to represent and control them as merely passive conveyers of transparent meaning. Rivett's ability to move between comparative European philology, a wide variety of early American sources, and recent theoretical contributions in Native studies is dazzling." --Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia

"Unscripted America is an important comparative and transcultural study of the deep connections between early American missionary linguistics in colonial New England and New France, American literary history, and Western intellectual history at the intersection of religion and science from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Rigorously researched and lucidly written, Unscripted America shows how the notion of the sacred power of indigenous words persists in American literature, despite Euro-American attempts to relegate Indians to an ancient and unrecoverable past." --Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland

"Unscripted America is a necessary and timely celebration of Native American linguistic contributions to American literature, history, and creative spirit. Sarah Rivett's insightful analysis is a sensitive and thought-provoking exploration of linguistic encounters between America's First Nations of the Northeast and colonial/settler societies. Rivett deftly shares with readers the importance of understanding North America's complicated literary and linguistic past so that we may recognize how deeply Native America continues to contribute to America's literary and linguistic imaginaries." --Bernard Perley, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee