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Afterword

The Puritan Imaginary and the Puritans’ World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

Kristina Bross
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
Abram Van Engen
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
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Summary

The Afterword brings together the contributions of the individual chapters in this collection and draws out what they have in common. It explains the shift in puritan studies through what does not appear (American exceptionalism, typology, and jeremiads), and it maps the current state of the field through two dueling frameworks: the puritan imaginary and the puritans’ world. The “puritans’ world” designates the way that historical, circumstantial, interconnected people and events affected how the puritans came to their ideas and how those ideas came to be written down. The “puritan imaginary” means the ideas themselves – the ways in which puritans tried to make sense and meaning out of the world in which they lived. Puritan literature requires scholars who come at the subject through both perspectives – those who seek to see as the puritans saw and those who look askance at puritan literature for the world that kept intruding and reshaping it. As the Afterword makes clear, that principle of combined perspectives is on full display in the book’s collection of essays, which revisit puritan literature from multiple angles of vision.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Afterword
  • Edited by Kristina Bross, Washington University, St Louis, Abram Van Engen, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: A History of American Puritan Literature
  • Online publication: 24 September 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108878425.022
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  • Afterword
  • Edited by Kristina Bross, Washington University, St Louis, Abram Van Engen, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: A History of American Puritan Literature
  • Online publication: 24 September 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108878425.022
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Afterword
  • Edited by Kristina Bross, Washington University, St Louis, Abram Van Engen, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: A History of American Puritan Literature
  • Online publication: 24 September 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108878425.022
Available formats
×