Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes

The Unsettled Records of American Settlement

Inbunden, Engelska, 2022

AvJerome McGann

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Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period.Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties—“a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.” A noted scholar of the “textual conditions” of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works—the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann’s book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory—the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2022-08-16
Mått152 x 229 x undefined mm
Vikt454 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor272
FörlagThe University of Chicago Press
ISBN9780226818450

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List of FiguresPrefaceIntroduction1: Scope and Method2: The Exceptional Encounter3: On Native Grounds: North American Treaty-Making (ca. 1609–1721)Part I: Puritan Enlightenment: Via DolorosaPrologue4: William Bradford: The Diary (1620–21), the History (Of Plymouth Plantation), and the Hebrew Studies5: John Winthrop: From Journal to History6: Anne Bradstreet: The World Elsewhere7: Cotton Mather’s MagnaliaInterchapter 1. Covenant Chain Treaty-Making and Franklin’s FoliosPart II. Secular Enlightenment: The Importance of Failure8: Franklin’s Autobiography: Composition as Explanation9: The Education of Thomas JeffersonInterchapter 2. The End of Kaswentha: A Brief HistoryPart III. Truth and Method10: The Arbella Sermon: A Case Study11: The American Scholar in the Twenty-first CenturyAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

“Bradford, Winthrop, Bradstreet, Mather, Franklin, Jefferson—over one hundred years of North American colonial treaty-making. McGann has spent the last decade studying early American texts, but this book reflects an entire career of fierce reading. Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes is an exercise in accuracy, thoroughness, and candor, the values that McGann calls for in scholarship today. His enduring concern with method makes this an important book for readers in the humanities more broadly.”