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Lations as inadequate. To act and write as if we can, to pick and choose among specialized or parochial scholarship to find what best suits the hobbyhorses we currently ride, only results in more of the same, “scholarship” that should not make us wonder why historians rarely consider our work relevant to their own (read Stephen Foster’s review of Andrew Delbanco’s The Puritan Ordeal to see how representatives of our discipline fare in the hands of dedicated worshippers at Clio’s shrine). Whether we are ideological or reader-response critics, interested in “discourse” or mere “imagery,” committed to Marxism or feminism, before we even attempt to jump on the New Historicist bandwagon we must pay more attention to the revolution in scholarship on colonial British America. What historians now propose about early America could reinvigorate- indeed, revolutionize- our field.
Why? Because the picture of early America now drawn by historians makes the versions derived in an earlier era (and with which literary historians often still work) look like laughable, and lamentable, first drafts. Indeed, most remarkable, given the recent redirection of historical scholarship away from New England, is the continued emphasis on this region, particularly its Puritanism, in studies of the colonial period and of American literature as a whole- Delbanco’s book a recent case in point. Indeed, after Perry Miller’s famous epiphany as he unloaded drums of case oil in the Congo, coming to believe that it was his mission to expound “the innermost propulsion of the United States,” and then assuming that to do so he had to commence with the Puritan migration, the course of scholarship in colonial American literature was irrevocably directed, the juggernaut of his works preparing the way for innumerable sub-studies of topics his formulations dictated. In the three decades since Miller’s death, his reputation and his scholarship have been widely debated but neither has been displaced, particularly for those who follow the paths he cleared through New England Puritanism to nineteenth-century American literature.
I do not suggest that the will come a day when Miller’s
The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989) and Stephen Foster, review of The Puritan Ordeal, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 47 (1990), 290-94.
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wildness (1956; rpt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964) p. viii