The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial
triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English
settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation,
disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment.
Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British
colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing
crisis--both experiential and existential--at the center of the story.
At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social
order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and
psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not
control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess.
According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty
that colonial identity was formed.
Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and
Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between
an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of
instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid
the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also
produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers
attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor
understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts,
Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary
analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to
describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and
report unaccountable events. Seasons of Misery addresses both the
stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we
have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new
account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of
colonial identity.
