American Puritan Imagination

Over the last two decades a major revaluation has been taking place of the colonial Puritan imagination. With the growth of interest in early American literature has come increasing recognition of its quality and a better understanding of its place in the continuity of American culture. However, much of the best critical work to date has been published as articles in scholarly journals, and in bringing together for the first time the best work in this growing field the present anthology fills a number of important needs. It is at once a valuabale and accessible introduction for students, a summing-up of a new enterprise, and a guide for further studies.

Does heaven exist? If so, what is it like? And how does one get in? Throughout history, painters, poets, philosophers, pastors, and many ordinary people have pondered these questions. Perhaps no other topic captures the popular imagination quite like heaven. Gary Scott Smith examines how Americans from the Puritans to the present have imagined heaven. He argues that whether Americans have perceived heaven as reality or fantasy, as God's home or a human invention, as a source of inspiration and comfort or an opiate that distracts from earthly life, or as a place of worship or a perpetual playground has varied largely according to the spirit of the age. In the colonial era, conceptions of heaven focused primarily on the glory of God. For the Victorians, heaven was a warm, comfortable home where people would live forever with their family and friends. Today, heaven is often less distinctively Christian and more of a celestial entertainment center or a paradise where everyone can reach his full potential. Drawing on an astounding array of sources, including works of art, music, sociology, psychology, folklore, liturgy, sermons, poetry, fiction, jokes, and devotional books, Smith paints a sweeping, provocative portrait of what Americans-from Jonathan Edwards to Mitch Albom-have thought about heaven.

Innumerable men and women in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were gripped by the anxiety, often conviction, that they were doomed to go to hell. This condition of mind was commonly enmeshed with such circumstances as parental severity, social exclusion, and economic decline, which seemed to give cogency to a Calvinist theology specializing in the idea of rejection. This book investigates how a menacing discourse compounding theology and social experience constructs subjectivity and shapes texts. Looking at a variety of sources, including puritan autobiographies and works by Bunyan, Burton, Donne, Marlowe, and Milton the book challenges both the assumption of authorial autonomy and the emollience toward protestant culture that have informed most literary studies of the period.

Errata slip inserted. Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Puritan Cosmopolis traces a sense of kinship that emerged from within the larger realm of Puritan law and literature in late seventeenth-century New England. Nan Goodman argues that these early modern Puritans-connected to the cosmopolis in part through travel, trade, and politics-were also thinking in terms that went beyond feeling affiliated with people in remote places, or what cosmopolitan theorists call "attachment at a distance." In this way Puritan writers and readers were not simply learning about others, but also cultivating an awareness of themselves as ethically related to people all around the world. Such thought experiments originated and advanced through the law, specifically the law of nations, a precursor to international law and an inspiration for much of the imagination and literary expression of cosmopolitanism among the Puritans. The Puritan Cosmopolis shows that by internalizing the legal theories that pertained to the world writ large, the Puritans were able to experiment with concepts of extended obligation, re-conceptualize war, contemplate new ways of cultivating peace, and rewrite the very meaning of Puritan living. Through a detailed consideration of Puritan legal thought, Goodman provides an unexpected link between the Puritans, Jews, and Ottomans in the early modern world and reveals how the Puritan legal and literary past relates to present concerns about globalism and cosmopolitanism.

An interdisciplinary annual that addresses spiritual concerns that existed in Puritan America. Essays about American Puritans and Puritanism vis-a-vis other forms of Protestantism in Puritan America are welcome, as are discussions of the persistence of Puritan America beyond the 18th-century, or the influence of Puritan America on later generations. Submissions may focus on history, theology, literature, material culture or music of Puritan America, but analysis or interpretation should be responsive to a religious context.

For generations, scholars have imagined American puritans as religious enthusiasts, fleeing persecution, finding refuge in Massachusetts, and founding 'America'. The puritans have been read as a product of New England and the origin of American exceptionalism. This History challenges the usual understanding of American puritans, offering new ways of reading their history and their literary culture. Together, an international team of authors make clear that puritan America cannot be thought of apart from Native America, and that its literature is also grounded in Britain, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and networks that spanned the globe. Each chapter focuses on a single place, method, idea, or context to read familiar texts anew and to introduce forgotten or neglected voices and writings. A History of American Puritan Literature is a collaborative effort to create not a singular literary history, but a series of interlocked new histories of American puritan literature.