Queequeg’s Coffin

Rather than seeing American literature as beginning with the writings of English or Spanish colonists, Brander Rasmussen points to the wide variety of indigenous writing in the Americas prior to colonization. From the earliest periods of colonial arrival, there were conversations between indigenous people and European settlers and between their texts as well. Brander Rasmussen proposes a literature of the Americas that includes both indigenous and alphabetic literatures and looks comparatively at the interactions. The study looks at writing between 1524 and the mid-19th century work of Herman Melville.