ABSTRACT
In 1500, English was written by a small class of people in an island kingdom on the margin of Europe. By 1800, it was the language of a colonial system that stretched around the earth, from India and Australia to the Caribbean and Newfoundland. The Atlantic rim, in particular, had become the scene of a complex Anglophone world. The English Literatures of America is a guide to the written culture of that world; it includes texts by explorers, Creole settlers, the peoples they subjugated, and Englishmen who viewed the Americas only from the banks of the Thames. The differences are significant enough to speak of many literatures rather than one. Yet all of texts in this book were caught up, to different degrees, in a new world of empire and commerce.
