请问有谁读过《thepuritanoriginsoftheamericanself》这本书?这本书大概讲些什么?cottonmather'stitletohislifeofjohnwinthrop这句话是什么意思?其中cottonmather是谁,johnwinthrop

Question

请问有谁读过《the puritan origins of the american self》这本书?这本书大概讲些什么?
cotton mather's title to his life of john winthrop这句话是什么意思?其中cotton mather 是谁,john winthrop

Answer 1

In the past twenty years or so,literary critics and historians have slowly begun to admit that they have exaggerated the role of the Puritans in American history and literature (for a good web essay on this issue,see The American Sense of Puritan.From the simple tale of the first Thanksgiving spoon fed to many of us from elementary schools,scholars have begun to explore other stories of America's earliest colonial years.Thankfully,anthologies now include narratives of the invasions of New Spain,Virginia,and French America as well as attempts to reconstruct lost and destroyed native voices.America,as we will see later in this course,turns out to have had a pretty diverse and,dare we say it,"multicultural' birth (if we can fairly describe the European invasion of America as a birth!).
If all this is true,you ask,why start with the Puritans in this course?I think it worthwhile to start with the Puritans exactly because of the interest they have generated from scholars searching for the origins of a mythical American self.Long before Grant Wood offered his take on America in American Gothic,the Puritans struggled to represent their arrival and settlement and interpret the meanings of their own triumphs and sufferings in America.When 19th Century American historians and writers looked back for some resembling a national origin story,the Puritan interest in the interpretation of human life and history for signs of God's approval offered a nearly irresistible opportunity.The search for validation as God's chosen people,the commitment to self-examination,and the superficially democratic appearing governing systems of the Puritans looked to 19th Century American historians (and,by the way,to American studies scholars living during the Cold War) like the seeds of a unique nation destined for greatness.
Because so many of the texts we will read in this course--because so much of American history itself--has questioned and challenged the notion of an America founded (and forever grounded) in Puritanism,some Puritan representations,both historical and literary,offer a useful fram for our reading and a dramatic counterpoint to the Thomas Pynchon text we jump to next.
I have organized the readings for our class on 2/13 primarily to set up our discussion of Anne Bradstreet's poems.For that reason,I recommend moving quickly through Bradford,Winthrop,and The New Engalnd Primer,and,to some extent,"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," looking to them for a context against with (or along with) we will discuss Bradstreet.Even with this prioritizing principle,however,each of these contextualizing texts offers its own riches.