he facts surrounding Olaudah Equiano's birth and childhood are discussed by Vincent Carretta in "Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Iden- ity" (Slavery and Abolition 20 [99): 96-105). Carretta suggests that Equiano may have been born in South Carolina, and concludes that he certainly manipulated some of the facts of his life in his autobiography. Robin Sabino and Jennifer Hall, in "The Path Not Taken: Cultural Identity in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano" (MELUS 24 [991: 5-19), argue that Equiano's autobiography reflects his Igbo roots and values, particularly in his highly selective acculturation to Western practices. Jesús Benito and Ana Manzanas argue that Eequiano's Narrative is a type of travel literature that subverts the categories of "savage" and "civilized" that Europeans established in their encounters with Africa and America ("The (De)Construction of the Other in The Interesting Narrative ofthe Life of Olaudah Equiano," in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, eds. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, and Carl Pederson [Oxford U P 991, 47-56).

John Saillant studies John Jea's Life (1816) in "Traveling in Old and New Worlds with John Jea, the African Preacher, 1773-1816" (Jr. of American Studies 33 [99]: 473-490). Saillant argues that Jea never comprehended the ways that he remained unfree once he was manumitted; his republican understanding of slavery obscured the reality of his own experiences in 19th-century liberal America. In another article, Saillant compares Anne and Elizabeth Hart's thoughts on slavery, religion, and freedom to those held by Equiano, Marrant, Allen, and other black contemporaries ("Antiguan Methodism and Antislavery Activity: Anne and Elizabeth Hart in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic," (Church History 69 [001: 86-115). Here, Saillant concludes that the Hart sisters were meliorationists, not abolitionists, as were many of their contemporaries.

Frances Smith Foster looks more generally at the Afro-Protestant press in the first two-thirds of the 19th century ("African Americans, Literature, and the Nineteenth-Century Afro-Protestant Press," in Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America, eds. Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams [Ohio State U. P. 99], 24-35). She urges a closer analysis of the relationships between religious institutions and literary production in the African- American community. Generic relationships between captivity narratives and other popular literary genres interest Cynthia S. Hamilton ("Dislocation, Violence, and the Language of 'Sentiment,"' in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, 103-116), who studies Venture Smith's Narrative and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the contextof sentimentality. Popular literary genres mold the subject matter (dislocation and violence) of slave narratives, Hamilton argues.

Three books discuss sentimentality, and do so from quite different perspectives. Julie Ellison (Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion [U of Chicago P 99]) investigates the cultural history of public emotion as it is refracted through "Cato discourse" from the 1680s to 1800. Sentiment, or sensibility, she argues, is a transgeneric idiom that crosses gender lines and which serves as an index of the pain caused by political arrangements beyond the artist's control, but from which he or she benefited. Andrew Burstein (Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of American's Romantic Self-Image [Hill and Wang 991) argues that the new United States formed its self-image by combining zealous impressions of sympathy and affectionate ties to the reasoning intellect. Democracy, Burstein concludes in this discussion of American poetry and prose written between 1750 and 1828, is a temperament built on the encouragement of good works and public virtue. Donna R. Bontatibus (The Seduction Novel ofthe Early Nation: A Califor Socio-Political Reform [Michigan State U P 99]) takes on the narrower scope of early national novels written by women, and argues that they articulate a "rapist" ethic that is intricately connected to neocolonialism. Novels by Rowson, Tenney, Foster, and Murray, she argues, were designed to raise the consciousness of female readers and forewarn them about the dangers of their disenfranchised status.

Another cluster of works investigates the public sphere, also from a wide variety of perspectives and methods. Christopher Grasso explores 18th-century Connecticut in an attempt to understand how the public speech and writing of the authoritative few to the people came to be understood as the speech and writing of the people (A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut [U of North Carolina P 99]). Grasso's analysis traces the transition in one region from colony to state, Puritan to yankee, republicanism to liberalism. Bryce Traister is interested in a similar sort of transition ("Libertinism and Authorship in America's Early Republic," American Lit. 72 [00]: 1-29), but from the perspective of male libertinism. Masculine gender formation is partially constructed in and through the idea of the libertine- author, Traister argues, and that construct helps to negotiate the tensions between republican and liberal visions of the United States. Grantland Rice speculates on the emergence of empirical methodology, metonymic reasoning, and literary symbolism in the late 18th century, a paradigm shift that can be seen as early as Crèvecoeur's Letters ("Cognitive Patterns and Aesthetic Deformations in Post- Revolutionary American Writing: A Preliminary Inquiry," in Reciprocal Influences, pp. 13-23).

In An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 [Stanford U P 99] Paul Gutjahr studies one aspect of print culture in the century following independence. From its first native printing in English through its diminished cultural influence in the late 19th century, Gutjahr argues, the Bible reveals its cultural status through the way it was packaged, promoted, sold, and distributed. Philip D. Beidler looks at print culture in the context of one region, early Alabama from 1815 to 1860 (First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama [U of Alabama P 99). Beidler argues that early Alabama literary culture, in works like Sewall's The Last Campaign of sir John Falstaff the II (1815), was part of the larger forms and processes of cultural myth-making in Alabama.

Jennifer Rae Greeson looks at the South from a different perspective: as the new nation's "other," a figure for the residual coloniality within the nation itself ("The Figure of the South and the Nationalizing Imperatives of Early United States Literature," The Yale Journal of Criticism 12 [99]: 209-248). Gustavus Stadler focuses on the Native American as the "other" at whose expense the private, liberal individual is constructed ("Magawisca's Body of Knowledge: Nation Building in Hope Leslie, " The Yale Journal of Criticism 12 [99]: 41-56). Magawisca, Stadler claims, enables other characters in the novel to interiorize their thoughts, while she herself is banished from society.

Two other articles are interested in the cultural costs of nationalism. Helen F. Thompson, in "Gothic Numbers in the New Republic: The Federalist No. 10 and its Spectral Fictions" (in Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, eds. Glennis Byron and Dennis Punter [St. Martin's P 99],140-160), argues that Madison's factions are both spectral and real. They serve, she argues, as a way for Madison to negotiate virtual and actual political representation by spectralizing the whole as disembodied Union and embodying fiction as a "sinister" appendage. National subjectivity, she suggests, is essentially spooky." Jenneatte Idiart and Jennifer Schulz argue that the American Gothic (including Brown's Edgar Huntly) is haunted by the repressed contradictions at the heart of the Constitution; as such, they offer counter-narratives to official stories, sites at which we can hear the voices of dissent ("American Gothic Landscapes: the New World to Vietnam," in Spectral Readings, 127-139).

The rise of political parties within emergent nationalism is explored by several writers. Jeffrey L. Pasley looks at the founding and growth of Fenno's Gazette and Freneau's National Gazette in the first Washington administration ("TheTwo National Gazettes: Newspapers and the Embodiment of American Political Parties," Early American Lit. 35 (00]: 51-86). He argues that newspapers were a crucial meins by which early political parties were structured and embodied in the decades before modern party organizations developed. Ginger Strand argues that theaters also served as a site at which party loyalties could be enacted--Federalists at plays like Gustavus Vassa in the Federal Street Theater (founded 1794) and Republicans at plays like Bunker Hill in the Haymarket Theater (founded 1796) ("The Theater and the Republic: Defining Party on Early Boston's Rival Stages," in Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, eds. Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor [U of Michigan P 99], 19-36). Saul Cornell (The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788 -1828 [U of North Carolina P 99]) analyzes the constantly shifting set of texts that defined anti-federalism in the 30 years following ratification. Resisting the tendency to reify anti-federalism, Cornell traces the dynamic process by which a small core of anti-federalist writings that circulated in manuscript and in print exerted a disproportionate influence in the debate on ratification and, later, in debates on the nature of the Constitution. (In a strict sense, of course, the anti-federalist stance was not restricted to a "party" view.)

Like Ginger Strand, Rosemarie K. Bank looks at the early theater. Bank finds that it has begun to borrow the techniques of cultural archiving from museums and galleries ("Archiving Culture: Performance and American Museums in the Earlier Nineteenth Century," in Performing America, pp. 37-5 1). E. W. Pitcher suggests a similar sort of process at work in the representation of Native Americans in the early Republic ("Inventing Humorous Indians in Early American Literature," American Notes & Queries 12 [99]: 41-49). The stereotype of the silent, stoic Indian grows out of an imaginative poignancy that merely affirms the passing of native tribes. Danielle E. Conger argues that Joel Barlow uses Aztec culture in order to refute European claims to cultural supremacy and to encourage French sympathies for the "noble savage" ("Toward a Native American Nationalism: Joel Barlow's The Vision of Columbus," New England Q. 72 [991: 558- 576). This, too, of course, suggests a kind of displaying or "archiving" of Native American culture.

Douglas Anderson looks at the representation of internal, not public, space. In "Subterraneous Virginia: The Ethical Poetics of Thomas Jefferson" (Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 [00]: 233-249), Anderson argues that Jefferson tries to explore the "inner topography" of landscape, self, and nation in Notes on the State of Virginia, dramatizing the intersection of psychology and history in the process; but, he also finds, Jefferson finally fails to map or draw that interior landscape. Ann Fabian is interested in the inner self from the point of view of personal narratives (The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth- Century America [U of California P 00]). She studies first-person narratives from across the 19th century, looking at the way that the experiences of socially marginalized individuals--always mediated by cultural authorities--were gradually habilitated.

Benjamin Franklin was a model for many of those self-biographers, of course. He is the subject of two book-length studies. James Campbell attempts to recover Franklin as an early Pragmatist (Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration o fa Life of Science and Service [Open Court 99]). Campbell looks at Franklin's work in science, morality, religion, and social issues, and concludes that his spirit was "essentially Pragmatic." Kerry S. Walters (Benjamin Franklin and His Gods [U of Illinois P 99]) studies Franklin's writings on religion, and concludes that, beginning in 1728 in his "Articles of Faith and Acts of Religion," Franklin adopted and maintained a doctrine of "theistic perspectivism." Franklin believed in a Newtonian "first cause," Walters argues, but he came to see that human beings represent the deity in a variety of acceptable ways or "perspec- tives," all of them culturally and historically bound.

Washington Irving is the subject of two articles. Richard V. McLamore studies the figures of literary inheritance and cultural transmission in The Sketch Book, and argues that the miscellany is organized thematically by the "upstart"--both specific characters and the new nation itself-who appropriates a restricted creative spirit from a closely related rival ("The Dutchman in the Attic: Claiming an Inheritance in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon," American Lit. 72 [00]: 31- 57). MeLamore claims that Irving was interested in combating a politically or economically based nationalism with a culturally based one. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy argues that Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman was informed by his reading of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" ("Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman and Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow": A Curious Case of Cultural Cross- Fertilization," Slavic Review 58 [99]: 337-351). She is interested in how both stories, written at the beginning of national literary traditions, reveal cultural tensions, specifically how their authors were caught in the growing pains of a young literary culture with competing claims to legitimacy.

John Wilmerding (Compass and Clock: Defining Moments in American Culture: 1800, 1850, 1900 [Henry Abrams 991) studies three cultural moments as they frame and divide the 19th century. In 1800, these figures include Jefferson, Peale, and Webster, whom Wilmerding very generally reads in terms of national consolidation and transition. Gilman M. Ostrander's posthumously-published Republic of Letters: TheAmerican Intellectual Community, 1776-1865 (Madison House 99) studies the "literary class" of the new United States, the "serious" readers and writers whose movement from science to belles lettres and from republicanism to democracy is traced in an overview of the early republican and antebellum periods.

More critically, G. R. Thompson and Eric Carl Link argue that the American Romance Tradition stretching from Brown to Twain has been misread by New Americanist critics (Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy [Louisiana State U P 99]). Thompson and Link show that the novel/romance distinction was well understood in essays and reviews in England and America in the late 18th century, long before Hawthorne puts the terms to his own uses in his prefaces. They take issue with the way "New Americanists" have mistakenly assumed that Hawthorne invented the terms. This study is engaged with both a reading of the archive and a reading of recent critics who have tried refute Chase's thesis about the centrality of the romance to American literature.

Readers may also be interested in the special issue of The Journal ofthe Early Republic 19, iv (Winter 99), which examines "Racial Consciousness and Nation-Building in the Early Republic." None of the articles concerns the literature (broadly conceived) of the early Republic, but all engage race and nationalism.

Four editions close this installment of "The Echo. " Thomas W. Krise has edited Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657- 1777 (U of Chicago P 99). Krise includes 13 excerpts and complete works in this edition, which reprints Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764) in its entirety. He provides an introduction in this paperbound edition.

Gordon M Sayre has edited Olaudah Equiano, Mary Rowlandson, and Others: American Captivity Narratives (Houghton Mifflin 00), which includes captivity narratives from the late 16th to the early 19th century, including Isaac Joques's Novum Belgium and James Smith's Account (both complete). Sayre provides a general introduction and specific introductions to each selection. This edition has also been issued in paperback.

English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World: An Inkle and Yarico Reader (Johns Hopkins U P 99) has been edited by Frank Felsenstein. Included are versions of the Inkle and Yarico story from its first appearance in 1657 to the mid-19th century; a handful of these versions date from 1770 to 1830. Felsenstein's introduction traces the develop- ment of the story and explains its ongoing cultural interest.