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Design in Puritan American Literature (Paperback)
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Design in Puritan American Literature (Paperback)
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Puritan American writers faced a dilemma: they had an obligation to
use language as a celebration of divine artistry, but they could
not allow their writing to become an iconic graven image of
authorial self-idolatry. In this study William Scheick explores one
way in which William Bradford, Nathaniel Ward, Anne Bradstreet,
Urian Oakes, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards mediated these
conflicting imperatives. They did so, he argues, by creating
moments in their works when they and their audience could hesitate
and contemplate the central paradox of language: its capacity to
intimate both concealed authorial pride and latent deific design.
These ambiguous occasions served Puritan writers as places where
the threat of divine wrath and the promise of divine mercy
intersected in unresolved tension. By the nineteenth century the
heritage of this Christlike mingling of temporal connotation and
eternal denotation had mutated. A peculiar late eighteenth-century
narrative by Nathan Fiske and a short story by Edward Bellamy both
suggest that the binary nature of language exploited by their
Puritan ancestors was still a vital authorial concern; but neither
of these writers affirms the presence of an eternal denotative
signification hidden within the conflicting historical contexts of
their apparently allegorical language. For them, appreciation of
the mystery of a divine revelation possibly concealed in words
yielded to puzzlement over language itself, specifically over the
inadequacy of language to signify more than its own instability of
design. This book is a tightly focused study of an important aspect
of Puritan American writers' use of language by one of the leading
scholars in the field of early American literature.
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