Dr. Nicholas K Mohlmann

Despite the remarkable circumstances of Brewster's book, I suggest that part of the reason her work has not been examined closely is because the poems themselves appear, at first glance, to be rather conventional eighteenth-century religious verse that reiterates the themes of conversion, grace, and religious emotion common in evangelical circles. [...]the circumstances of Brewster's entry into print are recounted, but the poetry itself remains more of a curiosity than an object of critical inquiry. Given that Brewster goes to lengths to reject gendered mediation and to display her poetic ingenuity, it seems counterintuitive that she would foreground accusations that she plagiarized her poetry from Isaac Watts, arguably the foremost masculine figure of evangelical poetry in the mid-eighteenth century.' Scholars like Putzi and Stokes locate the use of unoriginality in the aesthetics and social contexts of the nineteenth century, but work remains to be done to understand how developments in the eighteenth century contributed to the strains of thinking that established unoriginality, relation, and resemblance as important aesthetic qualities in American poetry.

This article examines the use of promotional rhetoric in the factional texts that record the dissolution of the Virginia Company of London in order to demonstrate that the individual forms and tropes of colonial promotional literature carried political connotations and effects beyond the general political nature of promotional literature as a whole. Through close analysis of the differences of the forms and rhetorical figures used by different Virginia Company factions, this article recovers how particular promotional tropes draw connections between commercial and colonial practices and contemporary arguments over political authority in order to support different approaches to organization. Ultimately, the article argues that close formal and rhetorical attention to colonial promotional texts is necessary if we are to fully understand their ideological effects.

When news reached London that the Powhatan Confederacy had mounted an assault on the Virginia colony in March 1622, the loss of colonists, infrastructure, and goods came to the Virginia Company of London as crisis among crises. Colonists were resisting efforts to diversify the colony’s commodities and shareholders were growing impatient with the lack of dividends. The Virginia Company responded to news of the attack by embarking on a print publication campaign to depict the violence not as a mere incursion but as a “massacre.” This article
examines this publication campaign to argue that the Virginia Company leveraged its corporate rhetoric to convert the violence of the so-called massacre into a dividend for shareholders and a vindication of the company’s economic program. Ultimately, the article argues that we
must read the Virginia Company’s publications through the lens of corporate strategy—not as reportage but as active efforts to generate capital.

The 1970s and 1980s heralded the rise of neoliberalism in United States culture, fundamentally reshaping life and work in the United States. Corporate culture increasingly penetrated other aspects of American life through popular press CEO autobiographies and management books that encouraged individuals to understand their lives in corporate terms. Propelled into the public eye by the publication of 1989’s The Art of the Deal , ostensibly a CEO autobiography, Donald Trump has made a career out of reversing the autobiographical impulse, presenting an image of his life that meets his narrative needs. While many scholars have sought a political precedent for Trump’s rise to power, this book argues that Trump’s aesthetics and life production uniquely primed him for populist political success through their reliance on the tropes of popular corporate culture. Trump and Autobiography contextualizes Trump’s autobiographical works as an extension of the popular corporate culture of the 1980s in order to examine how Trump constructs an image of himself that is indebted to the forms, genres, and mechanisms of corporate speech and narrative. Ultimately, this book suggests that Trump’s appeal and resilience rest in his ability to signify as though he is a corporation, revealing the degree to which corporate culture has reshaped American society’s interpretive processes.

The eighteenth-century eccentric and Quaker writer Bathsheba Bowers persists, despite the obscurity and scarcity of her written work. Although she supposedly wrote many texts, only Bowers’s 1709 spiritual autobiography, An Alarm Sounded to Prepare the Inhabitants of the World to Meet the Lord in the Way of His Judgments survives. Bowers in her writing as in her life refused easy categorization and rejected traditional markers of social and religious status. This essay argues we might attribute Bowers’s endurance to the completeness with which she occupies a liminal position, writing in the space between public and private discourse, pride and piety, autobiography and prophecy, masculinity and femininity, poetry and prose. The author concludes An Alarm is useful in its anomaly as a record of a colonial American woman’s struggle to articulate a profound, idiosyncratic experience in a time and place where such experiences were not often given a voice.