The Prologue orients readers to the classic tradition of American exceptionalism based in the Pilgrims and puritans, explaining how that tradition arose and to what effect. Sketching the development of a “puritan origins” thesis from the early republic through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the prologue ends in 1990, when a recognizable shift in puritan studies gained momentum. The Prologue gives readers a sense of how American collective memory built a story of noble Pilgrims fleeing persecution and establishing religious freedom on American shores. Pilgrim anniversaries of Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower landing were traditionally meant to celebrate and venerate an exceptional story of America rooted in New England and attributed to the singular virtues and values of the puritans. Yet even when scholars, politicians, pundits, and commentators turned against the puritans and despised them for various reasons, they still wrote stories in which the puritans were held responsible for all that the United States had become. Whether in love or hatred, in both praise and condemnation, the “puritan origins” thesis guided a great deal of American puritan studies throughout the twentieth century.

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.

The Introduction explains what we are doing when we claim to write American puritan literary history. It shows the development of that field – particularly as it was rooted in American exceptionalism and guided the construction of American literature anthologies – then explains the turn away from exceptionalism and the current state of the field. In the process we define each of the key terms in the title of this book: “American,” “puritan,” “literary,” and “history,” offering a general overview and summary of puritanism. Finally, the introduction lays out the three broader goals of the volume: (1) to introduce teachers, scholars, and new students to the complicated and nuanced tradition of puritan literature in America, set within broad historical, methodological, and geographical contexts; (2) to bring together new methodologies for, approaches to, and analyses of this literature; and (3) to suggest new directions and next steps in the field, including what the contours of such a field ought to include.