Access Type
Online access to this book is only available to eligible users.
Files
Download Full Text (2.7 MB)
Description
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.
William J. Scheick is J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Texas, Austin, and editor of Texas Studies in Literature and Language.
"A magisterial study of the uses of language by the major early American puritan writers—among them Bradford, Ward, Bradstreet, Taylor, and Edwards—by one of the leading scholars of their period"—Kenneth Cherry
Publication Date
1992
Publisher
The University Press of Kentucky
Place of Publication
Lexington, KY
ISBN
9780813154244
eISBN
9780813164205
Keywords
Puritans, Rhetoric, Puritan authors, Early American literature
Disciplines
Literature in English, North America
Recommended Citation
Scheick, William J., "Design in Puritan American Literature" (1992). Literature in English, North America. 27.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/27
Consortium members may access while on their campus.
