This multi volume History marks a new beginning in the study of American literature.
It embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries
of the field and redefined the terms of its development. The extraordinary growth of
the field has called for, and here receives, a more expansive, more flexible scholarly
format. All previous histories of American literature have been either totalizing,
offering the magisterial sweep of a single vision, or encyclopedic, composed of a
multitude of terse accounts that come to seem just as totalizing because the form itself
precludes the development of authorial voice. Here, American literary history unfolds
through a polyphony of large-scale narratives. Each is ample enough in scope and detail
to allow for the elaboration of distinctive views (premises, arguments, and analyses);
each is persuasive by demonstration and authoritative in its own right; and each is
related to the others through common themes and concerns.
The authors were selected for the excellence of their scholarship and for the
significance of the critical communities informing their work. Together, they demonstrate the achievements of Americanist literary criticism over the past three decades.
Their contributions to these volumes speak to continuities as well as disruptions
between generations and give voice to the wide range of materials now subsumed
under the heading of American literature and culture.
This volume, covering the colonial and early national periods, spans three centuries and an extraordinary variety of authors: Renaissance explorers, Puritan theocrats,
Enlightenment naturalists, southern women of letters, revolutionary pamphleteers,
and poets and novelists of the young Republic. Myra Jehlen draws upon the multilingual literature of exploration and colonization to tell the story of how America was
made up — a story of imperial expansion and imaginative appropriation. Emory
Elliott traces the explosive, conflict-ridden development of the New England Way
from its fractious beginnings through the tumultuous mid-eighteenth-century revivals. David S. Shields's focus is relatively narrow in time but rich in the materials it
brings to light: newly uncovered collections of poems, essays, and letters that reveal
a cosmopolitan network of neoclassical belles lettres extending from Philadelphia and
New York to the salons of the Old South. Robert A. Ferguson examines the interconnections between the many forms of discourse that constituted the American Enlightenment and eventuated as the rhetoric of nationhood. Michael T. Gilmore describes a
series of broad social and economic transformations — from republican to free-market
ideology, oral to print culture, communal to individualist values — in the course of
detailing the emergence of a national literary tradition.
All five narratives place the literature in international perspective; all five speak of
its distinctively American characteristics, whether colonial, provincial, or national;
and (in different ways) all of them demonstrate the centrality of language to the
course of Americanization. Together, they offer a compelling and, for our time,
comprehensive re-vision of the literary importance of early American history and the
historical value of early American literature.
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY
OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
Volume i
1590-1820
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE
General editor: Sacvan Bercovitch, Charles H. Carswell Professor of
English and American Literature, Harvard University
THE CAMBRIDGE
HISTORY OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE
Volume i
1590—1820
General Editor
SACVAN BERCOVITCH,
Harvard University
Associate Editor
CYRUS R. K. PATELL,
New York University
WSSW
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
page vii
Introduction
i
THE LITERATURE OF COLONIZATION
II
Myrajehlen, Rutgers University
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
The Papers of Empire
The Natural Inhabitants
Three Writers of Early America
Settlements
The Dispute of the New World
Traveling in America
The Final Voyage
NEW ENGLAND PURITAN LITERATURE
13
37
59
84
109
126
149
169
Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
1
2
3
4
5
6
The Language of Salem Witchcraft
The Dream of a Christian Utopia
Personal Narrative and History
Poetry
The Jeremiad
Reason and Revivalism
BRITISH-AMERICAN BELLES LETTRES
171
183
205
226
255
279
307
David S. Shields, The Citadel
THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT , 1 7 50 - 1 820
345
Robert A. Ferguson, Columbia University
1 Finding the Revolution
2 What Is Enlightenment? Some American Answers
347
368
VI
3
4
5
6
CONTENTS
Religious Voices
Writing the Revolution
The Literature of Public Documents
The Limits of Enlightenment
390
426
470
496
THE LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AND
EARLY NATIONAL PERIODS
539
Michael T. Gilmore, Brandeis University
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Letters of the Early Republic
Magazines, Criticism, and Essays
The Drama
Poetry
The Novel
Charles Brockden Brown
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
541
558
573
591
620
644
661
676
Chronology
B ibltography
Index
695
J6J
781
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FROM THE GENERAL EDITOR
I would like to thank Harvard University for a grant that enabled the
contributors to convene for three days of discussion and planning. I am
grateful for the generous assistance of Andrew Brown and Julie Greenblatt of
Cambridge University Press; for the steady support and advice of Daniel
Aaron, Eytan Bercovitch, and Susan L. Mizruchi; and for the critical and
clerical student help I received from Nancy Bentley, Michael Berthold,
Lianna Farber, and Jessica Riskin. My special thanks to Margaret Reid, who
helped at every stage and who prepared the index.
Sacvan Bercovitch
THE LITERATURE OF COLONIZATION
I wish to express my gratitude to the Guggenheim Foundation for a year's
leave at the beginning of this project. During this leave I benefited from
the hospitality of Dartmouth College, which granted me the use of its
extraordinary Baker Library. I thank the University of Pennsylvania for an
additional semester's leave. Robert W. Karrow, Jr., curator of maps at the
Newberry Library, offered invaluable help in selecting the two American
maps that illustrate my text; the Library has generously permitted their
reprinting. The title of my first chapter, "Papers of Empire," is a quotation
from Irwin R. Blacker's introduction to his edited volume Hakluyt's Voyages
(New York: Viking Press, 1965), 1. Some of the translations of European
texts cited in Chapter 5, as well as the title of the chapter, are borrowed
from Antonello Gerbi's magisterial The Dispute of the New World: The History
of a Polemic, 1730—1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1955). Finally, I am deeply grateful to Patricia M.
Spacks, Michael Warner, Emily Bartels, Marilyn Young, and Jessica Riskin
for their advice and knowledge; and to Sacvan Bercovitch for his editorial
guidance.
Myra Jehlen
Vll
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NEW ENGLAND PURITAN LITERATURE
The following institutions provided financial support for the research and
writing: the National Endowment for the Humanities, Princeton University,
the University of California, and the Humanities Research Institute of the
University of California. Early versions of the first chapter were presented at
the University of Verona and at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and I thank my
kind hosts, Professors Itala Vivan and Pierre-Yves Petillon respectively, and
others who also commented on the work: Professors Viola Sachs, Dominique
Marcais, Janine Dove, and Marc Chenetier. I am grateful to the director, Mark
Rose, and the staff of the Humanities Research Institute at Irvine for their
support, and to the other members of the 1991—2 Minority Discourse Project
for reading portions of the manuscript and offering most useful suggestions:
Norma Alarcon, Jose Amaya, Vincent Cheng, King-Kok Cheung, Kimberle
Crenshaw, Anne Dannenberg, Abdul JanMohamed, May Joseph, Clara Sue
Kidwell, Smadar Lavie, Framboise Lionnet, Haiming Liu, Lisa Lowe, Lillian
Manzor-Coats, Michael Sprinker, Sterling Stuckey, David Van Leer, and Clarence Walker. At the University of California, Riverside, I have benefited from
the readings and guidance of Steve Axelrod, Carol Bensick, Mark Elliott,
Bruce Hagood, Deborah Hatheway, Carla Magill, and Carlton Smith. Michael Colacurcio of UCLA, Bernard Rosenthal of SUNY-Binghamton, and
Heather Dubrow of the University of Wisconsin also contributed suggestions.
Although there are dozens of scholars whose works have enhanced my understanding of Puritan New England, I found especially helpful for this project
the work of Bernard Bailyn, Sacvan Bercovitch, Mitchell Breitwieser, Michael
Clark, Pattie Cowell, Robert Daly, Edward Davidson, Andrew Delbanco,
John Demos, Everett Emerson, Wendy Martin, Harrison Meserole, Robert
Middlekauf, Perry Miller, Karen Rowe, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Daniel Shea,
Kenneth Silverman, Alden T. Vaughan, and Larzar Ziff. I am also grateful for
the support of friends, colleagues, and staff members of the English departments of Princeton and the University of California, Riverside, and to the
members of my 1988 NEH Summer Seminar for their encouragement. I have
appreciated the patience and help of Andrew Brown and Julie Greenblatt of
Cambridge University Press, and of Elizabeth Maguire, formerly of Cambridge Press, and the confidence and suggestions of Sacvan Bercovitch and his
associate editor, Cyrus Patell. As always, my wife, Georgia, provided intellectual and emotional support, and my children, Scott, Mark, Matthew,
Constance, and Laura, cheerfully indulged me over many years in my preoccupation with the people and events of another time and place.
Emory Elliott
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IX
BRITISH-AMERICAN BELLES LETTRES
Although my account of British-American belles lettres owes an obvious debt
to the scholarship of the persons named in the final paragraph of the section,
there are influences that may not be readily apparent and that require notice.
For instance, the emphasis given institutions of literary conversation owes
much to Jiirgen Habermas's argument concerning the central place of coffeehouses, clubs, and the republic of letters in The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere. Peter Clark's work on sociability, Lawrence Klein's investigations of politeness, and Richard Bushman's explorations of gentility have
instructed my readings of belles lettres as texts designed for social pleasure.
Likewise, Dena Goodman's ongoing work on French salon culture greatly
aided my understanding of the institutions of women's writing and conversation in British America. The path-breaking scholarship of Pattie Cowell and
Carla Mulford establishing a canon of colonial women's writings is the precondition for any informed comment on the subject. My sense of BritishAmerican literature as a subject owes a good deal to the critical writings of
William Spengemann.
As Samuel Foster Haven Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, I
explored the relationship of manuscript communications and print; the findings presented here should be regarded as an exercise in the new deontological history of the book advocated by David D. Hall and Michael Warner.
A National Endowment for the Humanities summer research grant enabled me to undertake archival work on Lewis Morris II and Robert Boiling.
The American Philosophical Society supplied a grant to research the career
and writings of Archibald Home. The Citadel Development Foundation
supplied travel funds for work on Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, James Kirkpatrick, and George Ogilvie.
I thank Robert Ferguson, J. A. Leo Lemay, Wilson Somerville, Philip
Gura, and Cathy Davidson for reading and commenting on drafts of this
study. I particularly thank Carla Mulford for her scrupulous critique of its
argument.
Henry Brooke's manuscript poems, "A Discours on Je'sting" and "The
New Metamorphosis," are quoted courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. They appear in "Commonplace Book," Peters Collection, Historical
Society of Pennsylvania.
Captain Thomas Walduck's letter of 12 November 1710 to James Petiver,
Sloane MS 2302, British Library, is excerpted courtesy of the Trustees of the
British Library.
Selections from "Poems on Several Occasions by Archibald Home. Esqr.
X
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
late Secretary, and One of His Majestie's Council for the Province of New
Jersey: North America" are printed courtesy of the Trustees of the University
of Edinburgh (Laing Manuscripts III, 452, University of Edinburgh Library).
I thank Robert Micklus for permission to quote extensively from his
edition of Alexander Hamilton, The History of the Ancient and Honourable
Tuesday Club, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press;
Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1990).
Lewis Morris's political verse, taken from "Misc. Prose and Verse," Robert
Morris Papers, is printed courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Rutgers University Archives.
Joseph Green's letter to Captain Benjamin Pollard, 7 June 1733, SmithCarter Papers, appears courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Robert Boiling's "Occlusion," Collection, Br[ock] 163, appears courtesy
of the Huntington Library.
Elizabeth Graeme's "The foregoing song answered by a young Lady,"
Juvinilia Poemata, Manuscript 13494Q, is printed courtesy of the Library
Company of Philadelphia.
I thank Pattie Cowell for her permission to print the extensive quotation
from Susanna Wright's verse epistle to Elizabeth Norris, "Womenkind Call
Reason to Their Aid," Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 800.
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has granted permission to print
Susanna Wright's "Lines written . . . in the year 1726," J. Watson Notebook, Ms Am 307, 510.
I thank Carla Mulford for permission to quote the text of Annis Boudinot
Stockton's "To the Visitant," from the forthcoming edition of The Poetry of
Annis Boudinot Stockton (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society).
DavidS. Shields
THE AMERICAN
ENLIGHTENMENT,
I75O-182O
In writing my section of this history in the present tense, I ask you to enter
into a particular awareness of history as subject and as enterprise. "Presentism" is a term that historians often use to denigrate a misleading application of contemporary standards to the past, and the warning is a real one; the
dangers of inappropriate application always remain with us. My own use,
however, reaches for another reality. Whatever the dangers, the imposition of
the present on the past is also an unavoidable construct — so unavoidable that
it is well for writer and reader to recall that limitation together.
Contemporary appropriations of the American Revolution occur in every
era. That is what it means, at least in part, to have a legacy. But if the
Revolution changes with each succeeding generation, acknowledgment of this
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
XI
fact does not release the historian - even the historian as literary critic - into a
realm of unbounded speculation. Indeed, the hazards of an inevitable
ahistoricism should force writer and reader back upon the joined integrity and
volatility of primary materials. In this sense, use of the present tense signifies
both the slippage in any necessary ordering of the past and the sometimes
contradictory impulse to recover history in the making.
Literary history in particular welcomes the present. It dwells upon extant
texts, and I try to use the analytical convention to reach for more of the
original excitement that revolutionary texts provoked. Not fixed accomplishment but the messiness of ongoing event and the related immediacies of
thought and act drive the often hesitant language of the period. The now
arcane genres of sermon, pamphlet, and public document — not to mention
the forgotten placards of ritualized protests — are fluid forms evolving under
immense cultural pressure, not rigid envelopes in a static discourse.
What do we really know about the Revolution? First and foremost, we
have the writings, the related texts, and other artifacts of those figures who
participated in and witnessed events. Second, we have the so-called facts
gathered about those events, then and later. Third, we have the contested
ground of the history of interpretation regarding the period and its thought,
and fourth, we have what might more generally be called the history of ideas.
Like every scholar, I seek to combine the four elements in effective and
graceful ways, and I try to do so with the many previous approaches to this
cumulative record in mind. My contributions to the bibliography at the end
of this volume provide a partial record of my indebtedness. At the same time,
and in a competing goal, I mean to remind you of uneasy simplifications in
the combinations themselves. The past is always more complicated than we
can know. The most basic primary text glosses underlying incident, and each
new layer of writing contributes to the studied appearance of history.
I try to entertain these difficulties within several recognitions. Current
awareness of cultural diversity makes this a good moment for reexamining
national origins. Then, too, the writings and speeches of the period are in
themselves more rhetorically complex and more fully available to critical
consciousness than many have realized. I believe that we are still learning
how to read the basic texts of the Revolution and that the need for scrutiny
now is all the more engaging because of growing intellectual awareness of a
dialectics in Enlightenment thought. This scrutiny, in turn, benefits from a
singular piece of national good fortune: the federal union begins in a moment
when Americans take ideas seriously — not always the case in its history. If
this study opens any of these ideas to fresh inquiry for others, it will have
served its most important purpose.
In the community of scholars, five have been more than communal during
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
the course of this project. Ann Douglas and Richard Posner read and commented with care on parts of the manuscript. My immediate collaborator
Michael T. Gilmore made important suggestions throughout. John Paul
Russo and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson tested every word more than once.
Separate but together, they made as fine a committee of correspondence as
one could hope for.
I have been helped, as well, by the chance to place some rudimentary
thoughts for this project in print, where other scholars have been able to
comment and improve upon them. These items, for which I thank the
editors and publishers, include: " 'We Hold These Truths': Strategies of
Control in the Literature of the Founders," Reconstructing American Literary
History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1986), 1—29; "Ideology and the Framing of the Constitution," Early American Literature 22 (Fall 1987): 157—65; " 'We Do Ordain and Establish': The
Constitution as Literary Text," William and Mary Law Review 29 (Fall 1987):
3—25; and " 'What is Enlightenment?' Some American Answers," American
Literary History 1 (Summer 1989): 245—72.
Robert A. Ferguson
THE LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY
NATIONAL PERIODS
My contribution to the Cambridge History focuses on the flowering and
decline of civic humanism in the development of American culture between
the Revolution and the 1820s. This perspective derives from the writings of
historians and literary critics who see the republican period as originary of our
modern world but also as fundamentally different from the liberal and Romantic ethos that crystallized in the nineteenth century. Among the scholars who
have strongly influenced my argument, I would like to single out Gordon
Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, William Charvat, Cathy Davidson, Michael Warner,
and Benedict Anderson. The rich work on the origins of the novel form, both
in England and America, has been particularly important to my understanding
of early national literature. In addition to Davidson's work, I wish to acknowledge the scholarship of Lennard Davis, Nancy Armstrong, and Michael
McKeon. Other valuable sources — and there have been many — are listed in
the bibliography. As the reader will discover, I often disagree with the conclusions of the scholars who preceded me, but I could not have written this section
of the History without their pioneering investigations.
It has taken a very long time for this project to see the light, and I have
accumulated many debts along the way. The manuscript was read in its
entirety by Sacvan Bercovitch and Robert Ferguson; their comments led to
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Xlll
essential revisions that gave the book its final shape. Two former colleagues at
Brandeis, Allen Grossman and Anne Janowitz, acted as sounding boards for
my ideas and provided penetrating critiques of several chapters. Individual
chapters also benefited from the advice of Cecelia Tichi, Kenneth Silverman,
Amy Lang, Donald Pease, Robert Gross, Brook Thomas, Ivy Schweitzer,
Winfried Fluck, Andrew Delbanco, Eugene Goodheart, and Michael McKeon. Present and former graduate students kept me on my toes by challenging and refining interpretations I first ventured in their presence. Chief
among them are Steve Hamelman, Jim Keil, Ute Groenig, Marc Woodworth, Kim Hamilton, and Grant Rice. I am grateful to all these friends and
colleagues; none bears any responsibility for my errors of fact and judgment.
A grant from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1987—8 enabled me to complete an initial draft, and I am thankful for the support.
On a more personal level, I owe thanks to my wife, Deborah Valenze, who
supported me emotionally as well as intellectually during the years I worked
on this book. She read every word, shared my excitement, and endured my
frustrations. I know my prose is more lucid and accessible for her disciplining
insights, my spirit more whole and resilient for her love. In the case of my
two daughters, Emma and Rosa, the frustrations on their part far outweighed
the satisfactions. I hope they will forgive the times when I was unavailable
for outings. Their love too sustained me through the writing.
I finished revising this book not long after learning that my father had
terminal cancer. His courage and relish for life, even in the face of death,
were unforgettable. I dedicate this part of the Cambridge History to his
memory.
Michael T. Gilmore
INTRODUCTION
T
HIS MULTIVOLUME
History marks a new beginning in the study of
American literature. The first Cambridge History of American Literature
(1917) helped introduce a new branch of English writing. The Literary History of the United States, assembled thirty years later under the aegis of
Robert E. Spiller, helped establish a new field of academic study. Our History
embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the
boundaries of the field and redefined the terms of its development. Trained in
the 1960s and early 1970s, representing the broad spectrum of both new and
established directions in all branches of American writing, these scholars and
critics have shaped, and continue to shape, what has become a major area of
modern literary scholarship.
Over the past three decades, Americanist literary criticism has expanded
from a border province into a center of humanist studies. The vitality of the
field is reflected in the rising interest in American literature everywhere,
nationally and internationally, and at every level — in high schools and colleges, in graduate programs, in publications, conferences, and public events.
It is expressed in the sheer scope of scholarly activity and in the polemical
intensity of debate. Virtually every recent school of criticism has found not
just its followers here but many of its leading exponents. And increasingly
over the past three decades, American texts have provided the focus for interand cross-disciplinary investigation. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and
popular-culture studies, among others, have penetrated to all corners of the
profession, but their single largest base is American literature. The same is
true with regard to controversies over multiculturalism and canon formation:
the issues are transhistorical and transcultural, but the debates themselves
have turned mainly on American books.
We need not endorse all of these movements, or any one of them entirely,
to see in the activity they have generated the dynamics of intellectual growth.
Nor need we obscure the hard facts of intellectual growth — startling disparities in quality, a proliferation of jargons, and the mixed blessings of the new,
innovation and mere trendiness entwined — to recognize the benefits in this
case for literary and cultural study. However we situate ourselves in current
2
INTRODUCTION
polemics, it seems clear that Americanist literary criticism has proved to be a
forerunner of developments in other humanistic disciplines, precisely through
its openness to diversity and debate. And for much the same reason, American literature has become something of a new-found—land for teaching and
research. In addition to publishing massive new editions of the nation's
literary classics, scholars have undertaken an unprecedented recovery of neglected and undervalued bodies of writing. We know far more now than ever
before about what some have termed (in the plural) American literatures, a
term grounded in the persistence in the United States of different traditions,
different kinds of aesthetics, even different notions of the literary.
These developments have substantially enlarged the meanings as well as
the materials of American literature. For this generation of critics and scholars, American literary history is no longer the history of a certain, agreedupon group of American masterworks. Nor is it any longer based upon a
certain, agreed-upon historical perspective on American writing. The quests
for certainty and agreement continue, as they must, but they proceed now
within a climate of critical decentralization — of controversy, competition,
and, at best, dialogue among different voices, different frames of explanation.
This scene of conflict has been variously described in terms of liberaldemocratic process, of the marketplace, and of professionalization. In any
case it signals a shift in structures of academic authority. The practice of
literary history hitherto, from its inception in the eighteenth century, has
depended upon an established consensus about the essence or nature of its
subject. Today the invocation of consensus sounds rather like an appeal for
compromise, or like nostalgia. What used to be a relatively clear division
between criticism and scholarship, aesthetic and historical analysis, has
blurred and then subdivided over and over again (in various combinations)
into a spectrum of special interests: special branches of expertise, special
kinds of investment in the materials, and special modes of argument and
strategies of persuasion.
In our times, in short, the study of American literary history defines itself
in the plural, through volatile focal points of a multifaceted scholarly, critical, and pedagogic enterprise. Authority in this context is a function of
different but connected bodies of knowledge. The authority of difference, if it
may be so termed, resides in the critic's appeal to a particular constituency, in
his or her command over a particular range of materials (with their distinctive set of authorities), and in the integrative force of his or her approach.
The authority of connection lies in the capacity of a particular explanation or
approach to engage with, challenge, or reinforce others — in its capacity, that
is, to gain substance and depth in relation to other, sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting modes of explanation.
INTRODUCTION
3
This new Cambridge History of American Literature claims authority on
both counts, individual and collaborative. In a sense, this makes it representative not only of the profession it speaks for but of the culture it
describes. Our History is fundamentally pluralist: a federated histories of
American literatures. It is also an expression of ongoing debates within the
profession about cultural patterns and values, including those of liberal
pluralism. Accordingly, an adversarial thread runs through a number of
these narratives, and it marks the History's most traditional aspect. The
high moral stance it assumes — literary analysis as the grounds for resistance, alternative vision, or relative detachment — is implicit in the very
definition of art we have inherited from the Romantic era through the
genteel critics. The earlier, consensual view of literature upheld the universality of ideals embodied in great books. By implication, therefore, and
often by direct assault upon social norms and practices, it fostered a broad
aesthetic oppositionalism — a celebration of literature (in Matthew Arnold's
words) as the criticism of life, whether in formalist terms, as in the New
Critics' assault on industrial society, or in the Utopian forms of left-wing
cultural critique.
What distinguishes our History in this respect is its variety of adversarial
approaches and, more strikingly, the presence throughout of revisionary,
nonoppositional ways of relating text and context. One result is the emphasis
on nationality as a problem. "America" in these volumes designates the
United States, or the territories that were to become part of the United States;
and although several of our authors adopt a comparatist framework, by and
large their concerns center upon the writing in English in this country —
"American literature" as it is commonly understood here and abroad in its
national implications. Nonetheless, the term "American" is neither a narrative premise in these volumes nor an objective background. Quite the reverse: it is the complex subject of a series of literary—historical inquiries.
"America" is a historical entity, the United States of America. It is also a
declaration of community, a people constituted and sustained by verbal fiat, a
set of universal principles, a strategy of social cohesion, a summons to social
protest, a prophecy, a dream, an aesthetic ideal, a trope of the modern
("progress," "opportunity," "the new"), a semiotics of inclusion ("melting
pot," "patchwork quilt," "nation of nations"), and a semiotics of exclusion,
closing out not only the Old World but all other countries of the Americas,
north and south, as well as large groups within the United States. A nationality so conceived is a rhetorical battleground.
Precisely, then, by retaining the full range of its familiar meanings, these
volumes make "America" intrinsic to the literary history of the United States.
The matter of nationhood here becomes a focal point for exploring the two
4
INTRODUCTION
most vexed issues today in literary studies: the historicity of the text and the
textuality of history.
Another result of narrative diversity is the emphasis on history as the
vehicle of critical revision. This is the emphasis, too, not coincidentally, of
our cultural moment. At no time in literary studies has awareness of
history — or more accurately, theorizing about history — been more acute and
pervasive. It is hardly too much to say that what joins all the special interests
in the field, all factions in our current critical dissensus, is an overriding
interest in history: as the ground and texture of ideas, metaphors, and myths;
as the substance of the texts we read and the spirit in which we interpret
them. Even as we acknowledge that great books, a few configurations of
language raised to an extraordinary pitch of intensity, transcend their time
and place (and even if we believe that their enduring power offers a recurrent
source of oppositionalism), it is evident upon reflection that concepts of
aesthetic transcendence are themselves time-bound. Like other claims to the
absolute, from ancient religion to modern science, the claims of aesthetics are
shaped by history. We grasp their particular forms of transcendence (the
aesthetics of divine inspiration, the aesthetics of ambiguity, subversion, and
indeterminacy) through an identifiably historical consciousness.
The same recognition of contingency extends to the writing of history.
Some histories are truer than others; a few histories are invested for a time
with the grandeur of being "definitive" and "comprehensive"; but all are
narratives conditioned by their historical moments. The claims for total
description harden (because they conceal) the limitations of history: local
biases, temporal assumptions, and vested interests that at once compel and
circumscribe our search for absolutes. The interplay of narratives enables us
to make use of such limitations in ways that open both literature and history
to further and fuller inquiry. One way leads through the discovery of difference: the interruptions and discontinuities through which literary history
unfolds. Another way leads through the acknowledgment of connection: the
shared anxieties, interests, and aspirations that underlie our perceptions of
those conflicts and so impose a certain cohesion (professional, intellectual,
and generational) upon difference itself.
These considerations have guided the choice of the particular format for
this History. All previous histories of American literature have been either
totalizing or encyclopedic. They have offered either the magisterial sweep of
a single vision or a multitude of terse accounts that come to seem just as
totalizing, if only because the genre of the brief, expert synthesis precludes
the development of authorial voice. Here, in contrast, American literary
history unfolds through a polyphony of large-scale narratives. Each of them
is ample enough in scope and detail to allow for the elaboration of distinc-
INTRODUCTION
5
tive views (premises, arguments, analyses); each of them, therefore, is persuasive by demonstration (rather than by assertion) and hence authoritative
in its own right; and each is related to the others through common themes
and concerns.
The authors were selected first for the excellence of their scholarship and
then for the significance of the critical communities informing their work.
Together, they demonstrate the achievements of Americanist literary criticism over the past three decades. Their contributions to these volumes speak
to continuities as well as disruptions between generations. They give voice to
the wide range of materials now subsumed under the heading of American
literature. They express the distinctive sorts of excitement and commitment
that have led to the extraordinary expansion of the field. And they reflect the
diversity of interests that constitutes literary studies in our time and that may
be attributed in part to the ethnographic diversity (class background, ethnic
group, and racial origin) that has come to characterize literature faculties
since World War II, and especially since the 1960s.
The same qualities inform this History's organizational principles. Its flexibility of structure is meant to accommodate the varieties of American literary
history. Some major writers appear in more than one volume, because they
belong to more than one age. Some texts are discussed in several narratives
within a volume, because they are important to different realms of cultural
experience. Sometimes the story of a certain movement is retold from different perspectives, because the story requires a plural focus: from the margins
as well as from the mainstream, for example, or as being equally the culmination of one era and the beginning of another. In all such instances, overlap is
a strategy of multivocal description. The diversity of perspectives this yields
corresponds to, as it draws upon, the sheer plenitude of literary and historical
materials. It also makes for a richer, more intricate account of particulars
(writers, texts, movements) than that available in any previous history of
American literature.
Every volume in this History displays these different strengths in its own way.
This volume is perhaps especially notable for its diversity of historical and
cultural contexts. * Together the narratives span three centuries and an extraordinary variety of authors: Renaissance explorers, Puritan theocrats, Enlighten* These include various national and linguistic contexts: e.g., exploration narratives written in Spanish,
in French, and in Portuguese, as well as in English. Some of these texts are known by their original
titles (e.g., the Diario of Christopher Columbus), and in all such cases we have preserved the original.
As a rule, however, titles have been translated, and the spelling, both in titles and quotations, has been
modernized. We have also modernized the spelling in all colonial texts written in English.
6
INTRODUCTION
ment naturalists, southern women of letters, revolutionary pamphleteers, and
poets and novelists of the young Republic. Myra Jehlen draws upon the
multilingual literature of exploration and colonization to tell the story of how
America was invented, territorially, culturally, and figuratively — a story simultaneously of imperial expansion and imaginative appropriation. Emory
Elliott traces the explosive, conflict-ridden development of the New England
Way from its fractious beginnings through the tumultuous mid-eighteenthcentury revivals. David S. Shields's focus is relatively narrow in time but rich
in the materials it brings to light: newly uncovered collections of poems,
essays, and letters that reveal a cosmopolitan network of neoclassical belles
lettres extending from Philadelphia and New York to the salons of the Old
South and Barbados. Robert A. Ferguson examines the interconnections between the many forms of discourse, popular and elite, secular and religious,
private and public, that constituted the American Enlightenment and eventuated as the rhetoric of nationhood. Michael T. Gilmore describes a series of
broad social and economic transformations — from republican to free-market
ideology, oral to print culture, communal to individualist values — in the
course of detailing the emergence of a national literary tradition.
All five narratives place the literature in international perspective; all five
speak of its distinctively American characteristics, whether colonial, provincial, or national; and (in different ways) all of them demonstrate the central ity of language to the course of Americanization. This volume might be
titled "A Key to the Languages of America." Jehlen treats the languages of
discovery, exploration, and settlement. Significantly, these do not include
the languages of indigenous peoples,* except by proxy — through Bible translations, ethnographic reports, and dictionaries for immigrants (as in Roger
Williams's Key to the Narraganset language) — or indirectly, through what
the fact of their silence implies. Jehlen discusses the implications in both
cases, but mainly she focuses on the process by which the culture that
triumphed arrogated the symbology of America to itself. Her narrative unfolds in a series of cross-cultural debates — each a hybrid of fact and metaphor, encounter and interpretation — from the European invention of America to the various colonial constructions of a New World identity and thence
to the aesthetic—ideological strategies that transformed the discovery of otherness into a journey toward self-knowledge and cosmic origins. Her sources
are as diverse as the colonial experience: commercial, scientific, historical,
cartographical, epistolary, military, agricultural. Her method is a blend of
ethnographic and stylistic analysis: a cultural close reading of a procession of
The proper designation for these peoples has been a matter of controversy. We have adopted the terms
"Indian," "American Indian," and "Native American" as alternative designations.
INTRODUCTION
7
representative books, from Thomas Harriot's illustrated travelogue of 1590
through major works by William Bartram and William Byrd, which (she
shows) deserve to be studied as founding texts of the American imagination.
The terms of Elliott's approach are implicit in his opening scene. He
begins with the confused Salem trials, rather than with the mythic Great
Migration. His Puritans are not Founding Fathers but a community in crisis,
internally splintered over the meaning of witchcraft — rich against poor, men
against women, insider against outsider, one generation against the next,
laypeople against clergy, and one clerical group against another — each faction aspiring to political power through the ritual control of language.
Elliott traces the zigzag "errand" of a would-be Utopia that was fragmented
from the start and recurrently in danger of disintegration but that held
together, and flourished, through the capacity of its leaders to negotiate
between a changing set of realities and a dominant discourse they developed
of covenant and destiny. That development is manifest in different, sometimes contradictory ways in Puritan writing. As Elliott proceeds through the
generic forms — history, personal narrative, poetry, public exhortation — he
draws out the complexities of a literature designed for crisis, nourished by
anxiety and doubt, and alternately challenging the status quo and reinforcing
social structures. His narrative covers the wide spectrum of literary, theological, and political issues this entailed, including issues of race and gender in
early New England (for the first time in a literary history) and issues of
current scholarly debate. The result is a double perspective on the period:
first, a guide to the interpretation of American Puritanism; and then, more
largely, an analysis of the interpretive processes through which the Puritans
forged their vision of America out of the discordant (and finally uncontrollable) materials of colonial experience.
Elliott gives new drama and depth to a traditional scholarly subject;
Shields's history of British-American belles lettres is the first of its kind.
"Belles lettres" before 1760 denoted specific modes of writing, which Shields
defines and delineates, drawing on largely unknown and often unpublished
materials. In the process he re-creates the surprisingly varied, though highly
ritualized, "polite" world of colonial clubs and salons. Shields introduces a
number of significant writers (Dr. Alexander Hamilton, Archibald Home,
Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, and many others); he outlines the transatlantic
contexts of their "literature of social pleasure" (ease, wit, decorum, and agreeableness, as distinct from edification, revelation, or memorialization); and he
traces the literature's wide-ranging political and institutional implications.
The story that emerges tells of a particular group of men and women —
exclusive in class and outlook, distinctive in their neoclassical style and their
Loyalist sympathies — and so opens up a hitherto-neglected area of early Ameri-