Early Indigenous Literatures

Wheatley Title Page Annotation 1

Again, the ordering of the words on the cover page is useful to scrutinize. It starts with spotlighting the literary genre, poems. Then, it states that the poems will be about various subjects, and immediately notes that these subjects are religious and moral. There is a contradiction in the wording of the materials here; is the text about various subjects or solely the two subjects of religious and moral pursuits? Is Wheatley able to write about topics outside of these two fields? And if she is, why are these subjects not included in the paratext? This presents another example of “the control and regulation of the traditional archive,”[1] since the paratexts are directly stating the subjects that Wheatley can write about.
 
[1] Simon Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” (2015), 93.

Contents of this annotation: