This collection foregrounds an astoundingly diverse array of writing by and about women from the transatlantic and hemispheric Americas, documenting how women-including servants and shop-keepers, mystics and midwives, captives and converts, loyalists and criminals-situated themselves in relation to their changing worlds and served as agents and adversaries of colonization. Four decades after Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land, this ... Read morecollection charts new paths for understanding the symbolic power of women's bodies and the significance of women's writing to the work of colonization. - Jodi Schorb, Associate Professor of English, University of Florida, USA The essays in this collection skillfully incorporate a diverse body of recent scholarly emphases-empire, gender, corporality, and spatiality, to name a few-to offer a compelling and exciting new way of understanding the emergence, entrenchment, and continuing reinvention of empire throughout the early Americas. Anyone who studies any of the multitudes of cultural systems operating across early America should read these eye-opening essays. - Jim Egan, Professor of English, Brown University, USA A major contribution to historical and literary studies, these sixteen essays about women's engagement with and critique of empire building in the Americas should lay the foundation for an extended discussion of women and empire. The book's array of texts, time periods, and topics will make it the go-to book on the subject for years to come. Since it ranges so widely on so many fronts, I can envision designing an entire class around the topic and using many of the texts under discussion as primary sources supplemented by these essays. - Scott Slawinski, Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies, Western Michigan University, USA Show Less