The dividing line histories of William Byrd II of Westoveredited by Kevin Joel Berland.
- Chapel Hill : Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, (c)2013.
- 1 online resource.
Includes bibliographies and index.
Machine generated contents note: Introduction -- William Byrd II of Westover -- Taking up Land -- How the Survey Was Executed -- Accretion, Expansion, and Amplification -- Byrd among the Literary Critics and Historians -- Textual History -- Byrd's Narratives -- The Two Histories -- Prehistory of The History of the Dividing Line -- Byrd's Revisions -- Editions of the Dividing Line Histories -- Editorial Matters -- Editorial Method -- Internal Evidence -- A Note on the Illustrations -- The History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728 -- Endnotes to The History of the Dividing Line -- The Secret History of the Line -- Introduction -- The Secret History of the Line -- Endnotes to The Secret History of the Line.
"After his 1728 Virginia-North Carolina boundary expedition, Virginia planter and politician William Byrd II composed two very different accounts of his adventures. The Secret History of the Line was written for private circulation, offering tales of scandalous behavior and political misconduct, peppered with rakish humor and personal satire. The History of the Dividing Line, continually revised by Byrd for decades after the expedition, was intended for the London literary market, though not published in his lifetime. Collating all extant manuscripts, Kevin Joel Berland's landmark scholarly edition of these two histories provides wide-ranging historical and cultural contexts for both, helping to recreate the social and intellectual ethos of Byrd and his time. Byrd enriched his narratives with material appropriated from earlier authors, many of whose works were in his library--the most extensive in the American colonies. Berland identifies for the first time many of Byrd's sources and raises the question: how reliable are histories that build silently upon antecedent texts and present borrowed material as firsthand testimony? In his analysis, Berland demonstrates the need for a new category to assess early modern history writing: the hybrid, accretional narrative"--