Introduction

First published in 1767, The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield is an adventure novel featuring a multiracial, female heroic protagonist named Unca Eliza. The privileged only child of a Native American princess and an English settler, Unca Eliza frequently travels the Atlantic, moving freely between her home in colonial Virginia and her extended family in England, where she is educated and introduced to society. On her last voyage across the Atlantic, she is marooned on an island when she refuses to marry the son of her ship captain. She adapts to life on the island with the help of a hermit’s manuscript and eventually makes contact with the island natives, converting them to Christianity through a complex reconfiguration of both native and English ideas of gender and racial expectations; at the end of the novel, Unca Eliza eschews British society to remain among the natives.

With an adventuring female protagonist/author, the integration of fictional characters into historical events, and the use of popular fictions such as the narrative of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the novel’s transatlanticism has challenged critics and scholars. An eighteenth-century review of the novel declared it “full of wonders, and well calculated to make one sort of readers stare.” Yet another reviewer sheds light on the sort of reader imagined when he declares it better suited for an audience of Native Americans rather than a British audience. After being reprinted twice in the United States in 1800 and 1814, the novel largely disappeared until its recovery in the 1990s. When the novel reemerged it became evident that its very strangeness, the inability to neatly classify the novel and its protagonist that so bothered the original reviewer, was indeed the foundation for vibrant and increasingly complex critical conversations. Much of the early contemporary scholarship on The Female American, including Michelle Burnham’s introduction to the critical edition, focused on comparisons to its literary predecessor, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and on understanding Unca Eliza’s multiracial identity in relation to empire, colonization, and religious conversion in the Americas.

Over time, scholarship has expanded to include discussions of agency, cultural valuation, racial variation, transatlanticism, transdisciplinarity, and engagement with archetype and fantasy, among other topics. As we approach twenty years of contemporary scholarship, this special issue expands the conversation about The Female American by considering it within a thoroughly transatlantic context that brings together a number of perspectives and critical approaches in order to offer rich comparisons and new insights into the novel. The articles that follow take up such issues as genre convention, the role of the domestic sphere, identity construction, religious conversion, and social justice within The Female American.

Victoria Barnett-Woods and Anne Beebe each offer new insight into the novel’s generic influences and situate Unca Eliza’s actions within an expanded range of literary models of female agency. Maria O’Malley considers how the illusory power of the domestic sphere and intercultural contact lead to loss of power for both indigenous peoples and colonials in The Female American. Continuing the discussion of intercultural contact, Edward Simon examines the concept of non-colonial conversion as a way to reconfigure the decidedly anti-colonial views and emphasis on religious conversion in The Female American as the creation of a new, American identity. Peter Weise investigates Unca Eliza’s use of oratory as a self and communal transformation in the New World. Joe Conway explores the novel’s participation in the interconnected discourses of faith, conquest, and monetary policies in the transatlantic world by examining the role of gold in the novel. Finally, Marta Kvande recovers the novel’s radical thread in order to position its depiction of colonial encounter as an argument for social justice. While these articles address a wide range of topics, all elucidate the challenges The Female American and its heroine posed, and continues to pose, to historical and scholarly narratives of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.