“On My Head I Placed a Crown of Most Exquisite Make”: Shipwreck, Maroonage, and the Colonial Aesthetic Power in “The Female American”

The article concentrates on shipwreck narratives, offering some reflections on the different types of shipwreck stories, in order to then focus on the novel The Female American, anonymously published in 1767. As a truly transatlantic text, this work is in conversation with both The Tempest(1611) and Robinson Crusoe(1719), and as a shipwreck narrative it provides a remarkable model of settler colonialism and extractivist accumulation based equally on aesthetic pleasure, and on the symbolic and exchange value of colonial artifacts. The article deems this text to be a re-writing and revision of an imperial fantasy, situated at the intersection of a series of economic systems.