Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
Richard Beale Davis Prize, 201112 Michelle Burnham "Trade, Time, and the Calculus of Risk in Early Pacific Travel Writing" (EAL 46.3) by Michelle Burnham, professor of English at Santa Clara University, has been awarded the Richard Beale Davis Prize for the best article published in Early American Literature during the past two years. Among a group of impressive essays, Burnham's is remarkable for its pathbreaking orientation, archival richness, and theoretical subtlety. Succinctly put, Burnham makes a powerful case for the need to make a Pacific turn in early American literary studies. The essay surveys a range of Pacific travel narratives from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, texts that are often bulky and, for many readers, aesthetically dull and uninteresting, notwithstanding their relation to an important "period of international competition for scientific discovery and commercial profit" in the Pacific. Along the way, Burnham urges somewhat counterintuitively that the narratives' expansiveness is precisely the point; sizable profits and "new" knowledge that Pacific voyages produced depended on narrative "patience and prolongation," an effect--and affect--of the interdynamic between economics and aesthetics. Short-term loss (as conceived in abstract terms by investors) could be "averaged and canceled out" across these patiently prolonged
Early American Literature – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Mar 9, 2014
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.