Seasons of misery : catastrophe and colonial settlement in early America

Resource Information

The work Seasons of misery : catastrophe and colonial settlement in early America represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Seasons of misery : catastrophe and colonial settlement in early America

Title remainder

catastrophe and colonial settlement in early America

Statement of responsibility

Kathleen Donegan

Creator

• Donegan, Kathleen

Subject

• Barbados -- Colonization | History -- Sources
• Frontier and pioneer life -- United States -- Historiography
• Frontier and pioneer life -- United States -- History -- Sources
• Frontier and pioneer life -- United States -- Sources
• Great Britain -- Colonies -- America -- Historiography
• Great Britain -- Colonies -- America -- History -- Sources
• United States -- Colonization | Historiography
• United States -- Colonization | History -- Sources
• United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- Historiography
• United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- History -- Sources
• United States -- Social conditions -- To 1865 -- Historiography
• United States -- Social conditions -- To 1865 -- History -- Sources
• Barbados -- Colonization | Historiography

Genre

• Sources

Language

eng

Summary

• "The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis--both experiential and existential--at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events. Seasons of Misery addresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity." -- Publisher's description
• "A provocative and remarkably original contribution that considers the agony of settlement in early America. Donegan writes so beautifully that readers might miss the audacity and innovation of her argument."--Jill Lepore, Harvard University

Member of

• Early American studies

Cataloging source

PU/DLC

Dewey number

973

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

E162

LC item number

.D66 2014

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Early American studies