| Description |
1 online resource (xv, 268 pages) |
| Contents |
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1: Scope and Method -- 2: The Exceptional Encounter -- 3: On Native Grounds: North American Treaty- Making (ca. 1609- 1721) -- PART I Puritan Enlightenment: Via Dolorosa -- Prologue -- 4: William Bradford: Th e Diary (1620- 21), the History (Of Plymouth Plantation), and the Hebrew Studies -- 5: John Winthrop: From Journal to History -- 6: Anne Bradstreet: Th e World Elsewhere -- 7: Cotton Mather's Magnalia -- Interchapter 1. Covenant Chain Treaty- Making and Franklin's Folios -- PART II Secular Enlightenment: The Importance of Failure -- 8: Franklin's Autobiography: Composition as Explanation -- 9: The Education of Thomas Jefferson -- Interchapter 2. The End of Kaswentha: A Brief History -- PART III Truth and Method -- 10: The Arbella Sermon: A Case Study -- 11: The American Scholar in the Twenty- first Century -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index |
| Summary |
Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period. Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties--"a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records." A noted scholar of the "textual conditions" of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather's Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin's celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works--the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann's book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory--the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on February 16, 2024) |
| Subject |
American literature -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- History and criticism
|
|
Ethnic relations in literature.
|
|
Treaties in literature.
|
|
LITERARY CRITICISM / General.
|
|
American literature -- Colonial period
|
|
Ethnic relations in literature
|
|
Treaties in literature
|
| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9780226818474 |
|
0226818470 |
|
