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The Extra
This book’s ideas, I believe, must change the contours of the study of early American literature.
The power of Greene’s book drives not from first-hand research but from his compelling synthesis of the social history of all the British North America colonies as it has been established over the past two decades. When one assimilates this massive amount of material, Greene concludes, he sees that the colonial South, particularly the Chesapeake, has left the most profound legacy in the subsequent development of an American ideology. “Far from having been a peripheral, much less a deviant, area,” he writes, “the southern colonies and states were before 1800 in the mainstream of British-American culture: the conception of America as a place in which free people could pursue their own individual happiness in safety and with a fair prospect that they might be successful in their several quests” (p. 5)
In Greene’s formulation, New England is the odd colony out, not only deviating from the mainstream of British colonial development but representing a “sharp reaction to, even a rejection of it” (p. 36). Offering strong substantiation of what Bozeman has written about the New England “in so many respects military antimodern,” a social experiment “intended not to replicate but to move in precisely the opposite direction of the world they had abandoned in old England,” a world, of course, in the midst of a capitalist revolution (p. 38). In no sense, then, were the Puritans, particularly in the seventeenth century, the vanguard of middle-class America; such people were found in far greater numbers almost anywhere else in the colonies including on the island of Jamaica and Barbados.
Thus, in place of the Puritan origins of the American self, Greene posits the Chesapeake origins, because “the central cultural impulse among the colonists was not to identify and find ways to express and to celebrate what was distinctively American about themselves and their societies but, insofar as possible, to eliminate these distinctions so that they might-with more credibility-think of themselves and their societies-and be thought of by the people in Britain-as demonstrably British” (p. 175). To focus on New England is to focus on a sport.
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