Betsy Klimasmith
University of Massachusetts, Boston

Amelia was the first text I pitched on opening night of my new graduate seminar, “Reading and Writing the American City.”  I chose it as the first text of the semester for several reasons: its brevity meant that students could easily read the text as they prepared to start the fall term; the pdf format was easy to distribute to them even before we met; and I felt it would set the class up well for our next text, Charlotte Temple. And with its amazing resonance with and inversion, nationality-wise, of Charlotte’s presentation of rural and urban spaces, Amelia seemed like the perfect text to get us talking thematically about the ways in which the city is imagined in literature of the Early Republic.
(more…)