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The new England mind the seventeenth

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The fifteen essays here collected--several of them previously unpublished--address themselves to facets of the American consciousness and to their expression in literature from the time of the Cambridge Agreement to the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Hemingway and Faulkner. A companion volume to Errand into the Wilderness, its general theme is one adumbrated in Mr. Miller's two-volume masterpiece, The New England Mind--the thrust of civilization into the vast, empty continent and its effect upon Americans' concept of themselves as "nature's nation."

The essays first concentrate on Puritan covenant theology and its gradual adaptation to changing conditions in America: the decline in zeal for a "Bible commonwealth," the growth of trade and industy, and the necessity for coexisting with large masses of unchurched people. As the book progresses, the emphasis shifts from religion to the philosophy of nature to the development of an original literature, although Mr. Miller is usually analyzing simultaneously all three aspects of the American quest for self-identity. In the final essays, he shows how the forces that molded the self-conscious articulateness of the early New Englanders still operate in the work of contemporary American writers.

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Availability

171113181

974.02 MIL n

Z. HANDIMAN

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

974.02 MIL n

Publisher

Cambridge : Harvard University Press., 1982

Collation

xi, 528p.; 24 cm.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0-674-61306-6

Classification

974.02

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

-

Edition

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Subject(s)

NEW ENGLAND, PURITANS - HISTORY

Specific Detail Info

v

Statement of Responsibility

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