112 American Literature
In his concluding arguments, four of the first five presidents of the United States did indeed come from the Chesapeake region (p. 206).
I wish no to belabor these points but only to suggest that some new, truly revisionary scholarship by colonial American historians should give us pause for thought. We will continue to resist such reorientation of our scholarly priorities as long as we believe, subconsciously or not, that the most important lines of inquiry already have been established in colonial American literature, leaving us to work narrow and narrower paths that hold smaller and smaller promise of our returning with any news. But as Spengemann pointed out almost a decade ago, we still “don’t even have bibliographical control-let alone a first hand knowledge-of what was written in British American before the Revolution,” and to act as if we do is either ignorant or negligent.11 Spengemann’s point was to shame us into adopting a larger, more inclusive definition of American literature. And the historians on whose work we must depend if we are to remake early American literary history through the tools of New Historicism, tell us a similar thing. If the relationship between discourses and power really fascinates so many of us in the field of early American literature, we had better move beyond the shoals of Cape Cod.