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• W2043865379 abstract "Reviewed by: A Passionate Usefulness: The Life and Literary Labors of Hannah Adams Michael Everton A Passionate Usefulness: The Life and Literary Labors of Hannah Adams. By Gary D. Schmidt. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2004. 416 pp. $45.00. The Ladies Magazine equivocally proclaimed A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams, Written by Herself (1832) one of the most interesting things of the kind which our country has ever produced. This muddy praise reflected the reviewer's frustration over the author's terse autobiographical account, one impatient with the trifling details that would be anything but trifling to admiring readers. Hannah Adams, a pioneering writer who earned widespread esteem as an authoritative voice on colonial and religious history, was for many contemporaries a symbol of humility and intellectual toil. However, this woman of mythic 'firsts' has remained an indistinct historical figure (8). Like the reviewer, we recognize her significance even if we do not understand her life or her work as well as we should. Gary D. Schmidt's A Passionate Usefulness: The Life and Literary Labors of Hannah Adams, the first monograph-length biography of Adams, is a careful attempt to redress this incongruity. Though notable for its map of Adams's surprisingly large social network, the study's chief strength is its exegesis of her textual sources, so much so that A Passionate Usefulness is more a biography of Adams's books than of her life. Schmidt meticulously canvases Adams's sources to assemble a cogent portrait of her ideological positions—no small feat when writing on an era that privileged assemblage over originality. He follows her renovation of extant perspectives into a unified vision that is ultimately [End Page 203] Adams's and not that of her individual sources, as in her revision of Cotton Mather's John Eliot in A Summary History of New England (1799) (89). Adams's Eliot is shielded from Native American hostilities more by the socio-political machine of the English colonial superstructure than by what Mather, in his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), saw as the spectacular dispensation of God (91). In Schmidt's view, Adams subtly finessed her material from Mather to make implicit what he had made explicit and to add the strong presence of human causation (91). Because most of the sources explicated here are far less familiar than the Magnalia—and are itemized with deft care—this study provides not only a unique view of Adams's ideological thumbprint but also a functional account of the practice of historiography after the American Revolution. Schmidt as capably reconstructs Adams's remarkable authorial career, especially the ways in which she simultaneously blurr[ed] distinctions between private and public realms as she blurred distinctions between female and male realms (5). He articulates what Adams left unsaid in her autobiographical remarks on authorship, elucidating the industry that enabled her to succeed in a world that made it difficult for a woman to publish (352). The most famous episode in this restoration project is her caustic public quarrel with Jedidiah Morse. Here Adams is an aggressive, sympathetically wily participant in a debate that effectively forecast the fault lines in nineteenth-century print culture—a claim Schmidt scarcely substantiates but which is accurate nonetheless. No one since Janet Wilson James has so fastidiously unpacked this elaborate controversy, and Schmidt's version is notably useful for its management of Morse's conflicted role. Schmidt's account will stand as a register of a still under-valued anecdote in the history of American authorship. Yet the account likewise epitomizes some of the book's shortcomings, among them an over-reliance on primary sources. A Passionate Usefulness employs numerous meta-treatments of the period—Lawrence Buell's New England Literary Culture (1986), for example—but at times neglects work outside these foundational studies. One egregious oversight is Michael Vella's rendering of the Adams-Morse contest's gender politics, a reading cited here only for its commentary on Adams's proto-Unitarianism (364). Moreover, the book's dependence on cliffhanger and prophetic chapter conclusions and its occasionally hyperbolic claims belie its scrupulous analysis of everything from Adams's subscription lists to her abstruse evangelicalism in texts such..." @default.
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• W2043865379 title "A Passionate Usefulness: The Life and Literary Labors of Hannah Adams (review)" @default.
• W2043865379 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/leg.2005.0027" @default.
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