Robert Daly
University of Buffalo
The Puritan Tradition

We shall focus on not only the constellation of ideas and habits subsumed under the category of Puritanism, but also the Puritans' characteristic modes of perception and discourse, some of which inform later American literature and culture.  By focusing on various views of our first two centuries, we shall consider how tradition works (or does not) in America. We shall discuss the historicity of texts and textuality of history, the ways in which writers respond to each other in an extended conversation, the ways in which they reconfigure the past as a toolkit from which they draw in order to act, and the ways in which they tinker, mustering the past and invoking the future on the great palimpsest of America.

The recent "turn to ethics," the earlier "turn to history," cultural criticism, literary anthropology, rhetorical hermeneutics, trauma theory, ecocriticism, post-analytic philosophy, various historicisms, and any other isms and theories you bring with you may be of some help, but you do not need to know all or any of these to do well in this seminar. You should feel free, not obligated, to use any lens that helps us understand and use early American writings.

Each student taking the seminar for full credit will be expected to participate in seminar discussions, give one seminar report (12-16 minutes, cheerfully and ruthlessly enforced, so time it out ahead of time) on a topic chosen at the first meeting, and to write one research essay (12-24 pages, due 4 November), on a topic of his or her own choosing.  This essay should be aimed at eventual publication and should conform to the current freemasonry of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, published in April of 1998.  Each student taking the seminar extensively will be expected to do everything except the research essay.

Texts

Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Volume one only.

Heimert, Alan, and Andrew Delbanco, eds. The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Rowson, Susanna Haswell. Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Oxford)

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts. Ed. Mary Kelley. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1990.

Schedule

September
2    introduction, handouts, seminar report topics chosen
9    Other traditions, Bradford
16  Winthrop, Cotton, Hutchinson, Williams
23  Hooker, Shepard, Johnson, Ward
30  Yom Kippur

October
7    Bradstreet
14  Wigglesworth, Taylor
21  Mather, Wise
28  Rowlandson, Sewall

November
4    Research Essay Due: 12-24 pages; Edwards, Knight
11  Franklin, Wheatley
18  Equiano, Jefferson
24  A Tuesday, but the University will follow a Wednesday schedule, so this seminar will meet.
       Rowson

December
2   Sedgwick
9   Summing up

Syllabus

Other Traditions
In Lauter, see Seneca 56-58, Iroquois 59-62, Yuchi 115, Spanish (Pedro Menéndez de Avilés) 147-55, Seneca (Handsome Lake) 182-84, French (Samuel de Champlain) 173-78, and Anglican English (John Smith) 186-88, 192-98.

Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land. New York: Hill and Wang,1983.

Eccles, W. J. France in America. 1990.

Emerson, Everett H. Captain John Smith. 1993.

Folmer, Henry. Franco-Spanish Rivalry in North America, 1524-1763. 1953.

Green, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988.

Kennedy, Roger. Rediscovering America. 1990.

Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Murray, David. Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts. 1991.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. New York: MLA, 1990.

Scheckel, Susan. The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Swann, Brian, and Arnold Krupat. Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. 1987.

Sturtevant, William, ed. Handbook of North American Indians, 15 vols. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution P.

Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993.

William Bradford
Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison

Morton, New English Canaan, in Lauter, 211-23

Cushman and Winslow, selections in Stern and Gross, Ziff

Cressy, David. Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Daly, Robert. "William Bradford's Vision of History." American Literature 44 (1973): 57-69.

Demos, Little Commonwealth

Gay, Loss of Mastery, ch. 1-2

Langdon, Pilgrim Colony

Miller, Puritans, I, 81-89

Murdock, Literature, ch. 1-3

Read, David. "Silent Partners: Historical Representation in William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation." EAL 33 (1998): 291-314.

Sargent, Mark L. "William Bradford's `Dialogue' with History." New England Quarterly 65 (1992): 389-421.

Scheick, William J. Design in Puritan Literature. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1992. Ch. l, esp. pp. 6-18.

Wenska, Walter P. "Bradford's Two Histories." Early American Literature 8 (1978).

Willison, Saints and Strangers

Hawthorne, "Roger Malvin's Burial," "The Gray Champion," "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," "Endicott and the Red Cross," and "Main-street"

Conrad Aiken, "Mayflower"

Robert Lowell, Endicott and the Red Cross

John Winthrop
Dunn, Richard S., James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds. The Journal of John Winthrop 1630-1649. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.

"A Model of Christian Charity" (complete in Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas)

Winthrop and Cotton selections in Greene, Settlements D. D. Hall, The Antinomian Controversy

Baritz, City, ch. 1

Daly, Robert. "Recognizing Early American Literature." EAL 25 (1990): 187-99.

Morgan, Edmund S. "John Winthrop's `Modell of Christian Charity' in a Wider Context." The Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (Winter 1987): 145-51.

Rutman, Darrett B. Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1965.

Schweninger, Lee. John Winthrop. 1990.

John Cotton, Anne Hutchinson, and Roger Williams
Antinomian Crisis section in Heimert and Delbanco, 149-78

D. D. Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, esp. "Cotton's Rejoinder"

Cotton, "On Calling," Letter to Lord Say and Seal, Cotton on the New England Churches

Williams, A Key into the Languages of America (1643), poetry from Meserole and from Works

Cotton and Williams selections in Horner and Bain, Stern and Gross, Miller and Johnson, Pearce, Ziff, and Morgan

Barker, Francis, et al., ed. Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century. Colchester: University of Essex P, 1981.

Battis, Saints

Bercovitch, Typology, Puritan Origins

Camp, L. Raymond. Roger Williams, God's Apostle of Advocacy. 1990.

Coyle, Wallace. Roger Williams: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977.

Emerson, Cotton

Kamensky, Jane. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Lang, Amy Schrager. Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

Miller, Orthodoxy

Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State

Schweitzer, Ivy. The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991. (on Williams's poetry)

Spurgin, Hugh. Roger Williams and Puritan Radicalism in the English Separatist Tradition. 1989.

Ziff, The Career of John Cotton

Hawthorne, "Mrs. Hutchinson," The Scarlet Letter, "Endicott and the Red Cross"

Thomas Hooker and Thomas Shepard
Hooker, Redemption, selections in Ahlstrom, Miller, Pearce, Ziff, and Walker, Creeds

Shepard, Autobiography in McGiffert, God's Plot; "Sincere Convert" in Works I; selections in Ahlstrom, Horner and Bain, Miller, Nye and Grabo, Pearce, Ziff, and Walker, Creeds

Emerson, "Hooker as Theologian"

Foster, Genetic History, ch. 1

Frederick, articles in AL and SCN

Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, ch. 1-2; "Marrow" in Errand; "Preparation" in Nature's Nation (Cf. Pettit, Heart, and Feinstein)

Morison, Builders, ch. 4

Edward Johnson and Nathaniel Ward
Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, poetry in Meserole

Ward, Simple Cobbler (ed. Zall, Nebraska)

Beranger, Ward

Bercovitch, "Historiography" in Johnson

Scheick, William J. Design in Puritan Literature. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1992. See ch. 3 on Ward.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (on Johnson)

Anne Bradstreet
Works, ed. Hensley

Poems, ed. Hutchinson

Articles by Laughlin, Rosenfeld, Hildebrand, and Stanford (2)

Caldwell, Patricia. "Why Our First Poet Was a Woman: Bradstreet and the Birth of an American Poetic Voice." Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 13 (1988): 1-35.

Cowell, Pattie. Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America 1650- 1775: An Anthology. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing, 1981.

Daly, Robert. God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978, ch. 3.

---. "Powers of Humility and the Presence of Readers in Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley." Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 4 (1993): 1-23.

---. Entry on Anne Bradstreet. American National Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Hammond, Jeffrey. Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of Poetry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993.

Percy, Bradstreet

Murdock, Literature, ch. 5

Rosenmeier, Rosamond. Anne Bradstreet Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Scheick, Design, ch. 2

Schweitzer, Ivy. The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Walker, Cheryl. The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP,1982.

White, The Tenth Muse

White, Peter, ed. Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1985.

Berryman, John. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

Michael Wigglesworth
Diary, ed. Morgan

Bosco, Ronald A., ed. The Poems of Michael Wigglesworth. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1989.

selections in Miller, Meserole, Ziff

Daly, Hammond, Schweitzer, and Peter White--see entries under Bradstreet.

Crowder, No Featherbed to Heaven

Matthiessen, NEQ 1 (1928)

Strange, AL 31 (1959)

Edward Taylor
Poems (Yale)

Christographia, ed. Grabo

Treatise Concerning the Lord's Supper, ed. Grabo

Solomon Stoddard, selections in Miller, American Puritans and in H. S. Smith, American Christianity

Articles by Colacurcio, Gatta, Grabo (2), Stanford, and Thomas

Daly, Hammond, Schweitzer, and Peter White--see entries under Bradstreet

Carlisle, "Puritan Structure"

Davis, Thomas. A Reading of Edward Taylor. 1992.

Fiedelson, Symbolism, ch. 2

Gatta, John. Gracious Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989.

Gefvert, Edward Taylor, An Annotated Bibliography, 1668-1970 (1971).

Hammond, Jeffrey A. Edward Taylor: Fifty Years of Scholarship and Criticism. 1993.

Keller, Karl. The Example of Edward Taylor. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1975.

Miller, 17th Century, ch. 11-12; cf. Ong, Ramus

Pearce, Continuity--"Poet as Puritan"

Pope, Half-Way Covenant

Rowe, Karen E. Saint and Singer: Edward Taylor's Typology and the Poetics Meditation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Schafer, "Stoddard" in S. C. Henry

Scheick, Design, ch. 2

---. The Will and the Word. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1974.

Waggoner, Hyatt Howe. American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present

Walsh, "Stoddard"

Cotton Mather
Magnalia Christi Americana

Diary

Codericus Americanus (on the education of children)

Christian Philosopher

Selections in Heimert and Delbanco from Cotton Mather, Susanna Martin, Mary Easty, and Robert Calef;

selections from Cotton and Increase Mather, Danforth, Mitchell, Stoughton, and Willard in Miller, Plumstead (other jeremiads)

Bercovitch, "Rhetoric," "Epic," and Puritan Origins

Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert. Cotton Mather and Benjamin

Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality. 1984.

Caporeal, Linda R. "Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?" Science 2 April 1976: 21-26.

Elliott, Power and the Pulpit (good argument against the theory of "declension")

Middlekauf, The Mathers

Murdock, Increase Mather

Silversman, Kenneth. The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. 1984.

Richard Brautigan, "Cotton Mather Newsreel 1692"

John Wise
Churches' Quarrel Espoused

A Vindication of the Government of the Churches of New England

Breen, T. H. The Character of the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630-1730. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970.

Cook, Wise

Foster, Stephen. Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971.

Morgan, ed. Puritan Political Ideas

Rossiter, Clinton. "John Wise: Colonial Democrat." NEQ 22 (1949): 3-32.

Mary Rowlandson
A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration

Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Burnham, Michelle. "The Journey Between: Liminality and Dialogism in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative." EAL 28 (1993): 60-75.

---. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861. Hanover, New Hampshire: U Presses of New England, 1997.

Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Derounian, Kathryn Zabelle. "The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century." EAL 23 (1988): 239-261.

Ebersole, Gary L. Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995.

Fitzpatrick, Tara. "The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity Narrative." American Literary History 3.1 (1991): 1-26.

Henwood, Dawn. "Mary Rowlandson and the Psalms: The Textuality of Survival." EAL 32 (1997): 169-86.

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Logan, Lisa. "Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and the `Place' of the Woman Subject." EAL 28 (1993): 255-77.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. AL 19 (1947): 1-20.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence (1973).

---, and James Folsom. So Dreadful a Judgment. Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1978. (Puritan responses to King Philip's War)

Toulouse, Teresa A. "My Own Credit: Strategies of (E)Valuation in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative." AL 64.4 (1992): 655-76.

Van Der Beets. Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives 1642-1836. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1973.

Samuel Sewall
Diary, 2 vols., ed. M. Halsey Thomas (1973)

Selections from Miller and Johnson, Heimert and Delbanco, and from Letterbook (CMHS, 51-52)

Hilmer, Mary Adams. "The Other Diary of Samuel Sewall." New England Quarterly (1982).

Strandness, T. B. Samuel Sewall: A Puritan Portrait. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1967.

Winslow, Ola E. Samuel Sewall of Boston. New York: Macmillan, 1964.

Anthony Hecht, "Samuel Sewall"

Jonathan Edwards
Works

Images or Shadows of Divine Things and the Beauty of the World, ed. Perry Miller

Chauncey selections in Heimert, The Great Awakening

Cherry, Theology

Fiering, Norman. Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context. 1981.

Foster, History, ch. 2-4

Gaustad, Great Awakening

Hatch, N., and H. E. Stout. Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience. 1988.

Lesser, M. X. Jonthan Edwards. 1988.

McDermott, Gerald. One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. 1992

Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards, 1949, rpt. 1981

Ramsey, Introduction

Robert Lowell, "Mr. Edwards and the Spider," "The Worst Sinner, Jonathan Edwards' God"

Charles Ives, "Stockbridge on the Housatonic," from Three Places in New England

Sarah Kemble Knight
The Journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham, from the Original Manuscripts, Written in 1704 and 1710 (1825)

Private Journal (1920), ed. G. P. Winship; bio in DAB; bibl. in Lauter

Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle. "The New England Frontier and the Picaresque in Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal." Early American Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T.
Meserole. 1992. 122-31.

Stern, Julia. "To Relish and to Spew: Disgust as Cultural Critique in The Journal of Madam Knight." Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 14 (1997): 1-12.

Benjamin Franklin
Autobiography (Yale)

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text. Ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1981.

Aldridge, A. Owen. Benjamin Franklin and Nature's God (1967)

---. Benjamin Franklin: Philosopher and Man (1965)

Buxbaum, Melvin. Benjamin Franklin: 1721-1983: A Reference Guide. 2 vols. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983, 1988.

Connor, P. W. Poor Richard's Politics (1965)

Crane, V. W. Benjamin Franklin and a Rising People (1954)

Dauber, Kenneth. The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.

Lemay, J. A. Leo. The Canon of Benjamin Franklin, 1722-1776: New Attributions and Reconsiderations. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1986.

Levin, David. "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: Puritan Experimenter in Life and Art."
Yale Review 53 (December 1963): 258-75.

Sayre, Robert F. The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964.

Seavey, Ormond. Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life. 1988.

Wright, Esmond. Franklin of Philadelphia. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Phillis Wheatley
Poems of Phillis Wheatley, Revised and Enlarged. Ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and Community in Early African American Women's Writings. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Daly, Robert. "Powers of Humility and the Presence of Readers in Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley." Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 4 (1993): 1-23.

O'Neale, Sondra. "A Slave's Subtle War: Phillis Wheatley's Use of Biblical Myth and Symbol." EAL 21 (1986): 144-65.

Robinson, William H. Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

---. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. New York: Garland, 1984.

Olaudah Equiano
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789)

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986. (esp. ch. 2)

Costanzo, Angelo. Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1987.

Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slave's Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. (esp. Paul Edwards, "Three West African Writers of 1780's)

Edwards, Paul. The Life of Olaudah Equiano. 1969.

Thomas Jefferson
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1950-)

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)

Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987.

Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and His Times, 5 vols (1948-74)

Miller, John C. The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. New York: Free Press, 1977.
Onuf, Peter, ed. Jeffersonian Legacies. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. A collection of good, recent essays, including an essay by Lucia Stanton on the slave community at Monticello.

Peterson, Merrill. Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography. New York: Scribner's, 1986. Contains a bibliographical essay.

Shuffelton, Frank. Thomas Jefferson 1981-1990: An Annotated Bibliography (1992)

Susanna Haswell Rowson
Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth. London: 1791; first American edition, 1794.

Brandt, Ellen B. Susanna Haswell Rowson: America's First Best-Selling Novelist. 1975.

Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Parker, Patricia L. Susanna Rowson. 1986.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick
A New-England Tale (1822)

Redwood (1824)

Hope Leslie; Or Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827)

Clarence (1830)

Married or Single? (1857)

Bardes, Barbara, and Suzanne Gossett. Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century America (1990).

Burnham, Michelle. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861. Hanover, New Hampshire: U Presses of New England, 1997.

Bell, Michael. "History and Romance Convention in Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie." AQ 22 (1970)

Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Ebersole, Gary L. Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995.

Ford, Douglas. "Inscribing the `Impartial Observor' in Sedgwick's Hope Leslie." Legacy 14 (1997): 81-92.

Foster, Edward Halsey. Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Twayne.

Garvey, T. Gregory. "Risking Reprisal: Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie and the Legitimation of Public Action by Women."  American Transcendental Quarterly 8 (1994): 287-98.

Gould, Philip. Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (1984)

Samuels, Shirley. Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Context
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

---, and Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Arneil, Barbara. John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Axtell, James. Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

---. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Burgett, Bruce. Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Caporeal, Linda R. "Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?" Science 2 April 1976: 21-26.

Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Daly, Robert. "Transatlantic Perspectives: Founding Fictions in British-American Literature." American Literary History 5 (1993): 552-63.

Dauber, Kenneth. The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.

Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Delbanco, Andrew. The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.

---. Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Demos, John. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and Culture in Early New England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.

Dowling, William C. Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990.

Ferguson, Robert. The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

Furtwangler, Albert. American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Identities of the Founders. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

Gustafson, Thomas R. Representative Words: Literature, Politics and the American Language. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Hall, David D. Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996.

---. "On Common Ground: The Coherence of American Puritan Studies." William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 44.2 (1987): 193-229.

Jehlen, Myra. American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Kamensky, Jane. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1991.

---. People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization. New York: Knopf, 1972.

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980.

Kramer, Michael P. Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Looby, Christopher. Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origin of the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1996.

Newbury, Michael. Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

Porter, Carolyn. "Are We Being Historical Yet?" South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988): 743-86.

---. "History and Literature: `After the New Historicism.'" New Literary History 21.2 (1990): 253-72.

Samuels, Shirley. Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Scheckel, Susan. The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Shields, David S. Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America 1690-1750. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.

Simpson, David. The Politics of American English, 1776-1850. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Spengemann, William C. A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the Idea of American Literature. Hanover: UP of New England, 1989.

Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993.

Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.

Some Recent Theories
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. A good entry into ecocriticism.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1992.

---. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of `Sex.' London: Routledge, 1993.

Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 1997. See especially the discussion of"poetics" (61-63, 65, 70-82, 84-94) and "literary competence" (62).

Eden, Kathy. Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy & Its Humanist Reception. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. "The Fate of Reading Once More." PMLA 111 (1996): 383-89.

---. "Higher Education in the 1990's." New Literary History 24 (1993): 729-43.

---. "On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies." New Literary History 26 (1995): 537-63.

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