“…[T]his well-researched, well-argued, and well-written book succeeds in its ambition to shift our understanding of familiar texts and controversies…Burnhams' discussions remain fruitfully and respectfully engaged with a wide range of scholarship.”—New England Quarterly
“Burnham throws new light on well-known texts and events (of seventeenth-century New England) in this interesting and well-conceived book. Her interest in economic tensions allows her to redefine the ways in which these are read and to reveal new ways of understanding them . . . .”—Journal of American Studies
“Michelle Burnham's Folded Selves: New England Writing in the World System is one of the works that will help redefine twenty-first century colonial American studies, especially as it speaks to current concerns for locating American Studies within a wider geographical and intellectual perspective. Her first monograph, Captivity and Sentiment (1997), was quickly recognized for its useful consideration of sentimental discourses throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and with the increased deft of Folded Selves, Burnham reveals herself as a scholar whose personal development gauges her discipline's collective strength. Beyond the substance of the monograph's arguments, Burnham's writing style also merits praise. Her chapters are an ideal prose for their legibility, balance of textual readings against conceptual frameworks, and concision. Any contemporary graduate student, regardless of her or his specialty, would do well to study them as a model of forensic equipoise.”—Early American Literature