Authorizing experience : refigurations of the body politic in seventeenth-century New England writing / Jim Egan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Egan, Jim, 1961-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775--History and criticism.

American literature.

Rhetoric--Political aspects--New England--History--17th century.

Rhetoric.

Politics and literature--New England--History--17th century.

Politics and literature.

Literature and society--New England--History--17th century.

Literature and society.

American literature--New England--History and criticism.

Authority in literature.

Colonies in literature.

New England--Intellectual life--17th century.

New England.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (193 p.)

Edition:

Core Textbook

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation of a unique culture. Here Jim Egan offers an unprecedented look at how early modern American writers helped make this notion of experience so powerful that we now take it as a given rather than as the product of hard-fought rhetorical battles waged over ways of imagining one's relationship to a larger social community. In order to show how our modern notion of experience emerges from a historical change that experience itself could not have brought about, he turns to works by seventeenth-century writers in New England and reveals the ways in which they authorized experience, ultimately producing a rhetoric distinctive to the colonies and supportive of colonialism. Writers such as John Smith, William Wood, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Tompson, and William Hubbard were sensitive to the challenge experiential authority posed to established social hierarchies. Egan argues that they used experience to authorize a supplementary status system that would at once enhance England's economic, political, and spiritual status and provide a new basis for regulating English and native populations. These writers were assuaging fears over how exposure to alien environments threatened actual English bodies and also the imaginary body that authorized English monarchy and allowed English subjects to think of themselves as a nation. By reimagining the English nation, these supporters of English colonialism helped create a modern way of imagining national identity and individual subject formation.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: INVERTING AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Chapter One: HOW THE ENGLISH BODY BECOMES THAT OF THE ENGLISH NATION

Chapter Two: THE MAN OF EXPERIENCE

Chapter Three: A BODY THAT WORKS

Chapter Four: DISCIPLINE AND DISINFECT

Chapter Five: THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF EXPERIENCE

Chapter Six: A NATIONAL EXPERIENCE

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [161]-178) and index.

ISBN:

9786612753688

9781400801824

1400801826

9781282753686

1282753681

9781400823024

1400823021

9781400811441

1400811449

OCLC:

700688513