Abstract:This essay tracks the role of conspiracy and paranoia in Edward Winslow's Good News from New England (1624) and argues that the belief in a conspiracy against the colony is central to the text's representation of native culture and politics. Published in the wake of an early instance of New England settler violence, the so-called Wessagusset Massacre, Winslow's account presents the Plymouth Colony as beset by an amorphous indigenous plot—despite an admitted dearth of direct evidence for such a plot. Approaching the imputed conspiracy as a method of representing the settlement's history (and not merely as a mistaken belief about that history) emphasizes the structuring role of paranoia in Winslow's understanding of native actions and culture. The text employs the notion of a native conspiracy as both an improvised heuristic for interpreting encounters with various indigenous groups and as a means of narrating those complex encounters for an English readership. By tracking the function of conspiracy and paranoia in Good News, this article probes the dynamic relationship between representation, interpretation, and encounter in this early moment of English settler colonialism.

中文翻译：

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来自新英格兰的“卑鄙而喧闹的报道”：普利茅斯早期土著阴谋的幽灵

摘要：本文追踪了爱德华·温斯洛 (Edward Winslow) 的《来自新英格兰的好消息》（1624 年）中阴谋和偏执的作用，并认为阴谋反对殖民地的信念是文本表现本土文化和政治的核心。在新英格兰定居者暴力的早期实例，即所谓的 Wessagusset 大屠杀之后发表，温斯洛的叙述将普利茅斯殖民地描述为一个无定形的土著阴谋——尽管承认缺乏此类阴谋的直接证据。将推定的阴谋视为代表定居点历史的一种方法（而不仅仅是作为对该历史的错误信念）强调了偏执狂在温斯洛对本土行为和文化的理解中的结构性作用。文本采用了本土阴谋的概念，既是一种解释与各种土著群体遭遇的即兴启发法，也是一种为英语读者叙述这些复杂遭遇的手段。本文通过追踪《好消息》中阴谋和偏执的作用，探讨了英国殖民者殖民主义早期阶段的表征、解释和遭遇之间的动态关系。