American women's writing in the colonial period

One of the most prominent voices of early American women's religious authority and empowerment, Anne Hutchinson, is known exclusively through her reported testimony in the antinomian controversy of 1638, which resulted in her trial for sedition and subsequent banishment from the colony. Expanding on the work of Joseph Roach and Christopher Looby, Sandra Gustafson has opened the field of early American literature to include women's acts and performances. Effacing the anachronistic boundaries of subsequent literary traditions opens up possibilities for more accurately understanding the discursive situation of early American women writers. The recovery and study of colonial women's writing in the Americas should have as its goal the creation of new forms of coherence that will help people to group and understand the work of men and women alike, reflecting a complete, nuanced, and multiphonic account of life in the New World.