The Female American (1767)

"The pleasures of reading and teaching The Female American emerge from this edition's insistence on a more capacious scope for early American studies, one in sync with recent scholarly emphases on transatlantic, global, and intersectional contexts of cultural production and consumption ... this second edition of The Female American, expanded by sixty pages, features a fascinating, revised introduction, one that further reveals to readers the elaborate intertextual and global aspects of the novel. Burnham and Freitas suggest rather than instruct, a welcome approach to introductory matter; they provide frames of inquiry -- utopian studies; female adventure literature; and discourses of imperialism, of religion, of identity, and of hybridity -- within which students and teachers might critically examine the text. Additionally, this edition's useful chronology along with two contemporary reviews effectively aid in historicizing and contextualizing the novel. With this second edition, the scholarly and pedagogical significant of The Female American in our own historical moment becomes even more compelling, as students and teachers struggle daily with issues of migration, racial difference, imperialism, and political and culture identity." -- Lorrayne Carroll, Early American Literature Comments on the first edition: "This adeptly edited page-turner of a novel is a fascinating descendant of Robinson Crusoe and an important example of the kinds of cross-Atlantic fiction being written to explore issues of colonialism, race, gender, nationhood, and human rights in the decade before the American Revolution." -- Paula Backscheider, Auburn University "Graced by an uncommonly interesting as well as learned introduction, this edition of the virtually unknown novel The Female American will invigorate any collection of colonial American literature." -- Myra Jehlen, Rutgers University

Unca Eliza Winkfield was the pseudonym of an unidentified eighteenth-century writer. Michelle Burnham is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. James Freitas is an undergraduate student in English at Santa Clara University.