SOURCE: A review of The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, in College Literature, Vol. 24, No. 2, June, 1997, pp. 215–18.

In the following review, Schultz offers a positive assessment of The Birth-mark, noting that although the work requires considerable reader involvement, that the “effort is more than compensated by the insights that Howe reveals or makes possible for us to glean.”

In The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, Susan Howe inspires readers to react and respond both to the texts about which she writes and to the text which she herself is writing in the same way she does—passionately and enthusiastically. This book does not attempt to give readers a coherent, logically progressive assessment of early American literature. What The Birth-mark does provide, however, is much more. Her text requires more involvement and participation than a standard critical text, but that effort is more...