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William Bradford's American Sublime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Laurence
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Abstract

William Bradford's tableau of the Pilgrims' landing at Cape Cod supplies a conventional point of departure for American literature. Yet, in the customary ordering of literary history, the passage is doubly anomalous. Written in 1630, it presents, at least one hundred years too soon, an example of what Kant later called the dynamical sublime; and it anticipates, some two hundred years too soon, episodes from the canon of nineteenth-century American literature that criticism describes as characteristically American. The essay considers the formal motives and rhetorical coercions behind this double anomaly to show how the sublime, as it emerges in Bradford, signals a withdrawal from empirical fact in a search for satisfactions of meaning that derive from literature. The level of aggression Bradford finds necessary to this withdrawal lends his writing a recognizably American bent. The passage shows us a scene of writing at once singular to Bradford and distinctly American.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 102 , Issue 1 , January 1987 , pp. 55 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1987

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