Seasons of Misery . . . not only recovers texts or textual episodes that historians and literary critics alike seldom read or integrate into studies of early America, but it offers new ways of narrating American literary and cultural history. -Early American Literature Seasons of Misery is a smart, provocative work that belongs on the bookshelf of scholars working ... Read morein the fields of seventeenth-century Anglo-American history, literature, and culture, as well as scholars interested in the cultural history of violence. -American Historical Review Harrowing, moving, and revelatory, Seasons of Misery offers up a new and unfamiliar vision of the settlement of early America-one that tells of unsettlement and trauma at the heart of the experience of early colonialism and encounter. In stunning prose, Donegan opens a heretofore unseen space in narratives of early America and the field of early American studies. -Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University Elegantly written and persuasively argued, Seasons of Misery provides sophisticated close readings of the early historical eyewitness accounts of English settlements in the New World. -Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland Donegan rightly calls attention to the tenuous nature of early English colonization efforts, highlighting the violence, deprivation, and contingency that marked efforts to establish permanent colonies. Her perceptive reading of texts offers many rewards, not least of which is a rich sense of how disoriented early colonists were by the catastrophes they confronted-and often created-in the novel social and physical circumstances of the New World. -Reviews in American History A provocative and remarkably original contribution that considers the agony of settlement in early America. Donegan writes so beautifully that readers might miss the audacity and innovation of her argument. -Jill Lepore, Harvard University Show Less