Unmoored

Ana Schwartz is assistant professor of English at University of Texas at Austin
For more information about Ana Schwartz, visit the Author Page.

“The book is unmooring, but it is also intellectually exhilarating—believe me or don’t, but please read it.”—American Historical Review

“Unmoored allows us to witness repression’s skill. Closely examining this sophisticated process, we might be able better to determine, perhaps mitigate, our own conscription onto a ‘similarly unhappy stage’ (33–34).”—William and Mary Quarterly

“Building on extensive literary theory, Ana Schwartz explores the actions, words, and especially the silence of social dissenters in the seventeenth-century ‘frontier’ world, infused with guilt for possessing a land that was not their own.”—Journal of American History

“Schwartz has a sharp eye for unusual and absorbing case studies. . . . [Unmoored] is not only a richly thought-provoking and original study, but it is one that opens the door to questions and avenues for future research which should prove of interest to literary scholars and historians of colonial America and the wider early modern world alike.”—H-Early-America

“A remarkable achievement. . . . Unmoored is a powerful book that demands consideration by anyone interested in the literature, history, or historiography of Colonial New England.”—New England Quarterly

"Focusing on the misfits and resisters to Puritan self-fashioning, Schwartz uncovers a pervasive biopoetic fantasy of realness. These sharp readings offer new approaches to familiar figures like Bradstreet, Wigglesworth, and Rowlandson and introduce us to an understudied cast of unforgettable characters, including enslaved and Indigenous people, who are the collateral damage of the American project."—Ivy Schweitzer, Dartmouth College