Bücher von Michael J. Colacurcio

Hawthorne's Literary History picks up Hawthorne where The Province of Piety left him, extending the historical and theological reading there developed of the early Puritan and revolutionary tales Hawthorne wrote in birthplace Salem on to the contemporary tales, sketches, essays, and finally four published romances based on his stays in Brook Farm, Boston, Concord, Lenox, Salem, Liverpool, and Rome.A collection of essays rather than a single, continuously argued monograph, Hawthorne's Literary History collects together the essays Professor Colacurcio has written on Hawthorne since the publication of his ground-breaking Province of Piety, elaborating and refining his analyses of how Hawthorne's most memorable early tales "e;do history,"e; but proceeding then to explore the later productions of that author's distinguished career. The result, in Colacurcio's patient analysis, is something like Hawthorne's history of his own times.

In Godly Letters, Michael J. Colacurcio analyzes a treasury of works written by the first generation of seventeenth-century American Puritans. Arguing that insufficient scrutiny has been given this important oeuvre, he calls for a reevaluation of the imaginative and creative qualities of America's early literature of inspired ecclesiological experiment, one that focuses on the quality of the works as well as the demanding theology they express. Colacurcio gives a detailed, richly contextualized account of the meaning of these "e;godly letters"e; in rhetorical, theological, and political terms. From his close readings of the major texts by the first generation of Puritans-including William Bradford, Thomas Hooker, Edward Johnson, John Winthrop, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton-he expertly illuminates qualities other studies have often overlooked. In his words, close study of the literature yields work "e;comprehensive, circumspect, determined subtle, energetic, relentlessly intellectual, playful in spite of their cultural prohibitions, in spite of themselves, even, they are in every way remarkable products of a culture that . . . assigned an extraordinarily high place to the life of words."e; Magisterial in sweep, Godly Letters is likely to stand as the definitive work on the Puritan literary achievement.

This work shows how the spirit and forms of liberalism are a necessary but by no means sufficient explanation for the flowering of literature in 19th-century New England. The work of writers such as Melville, Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson is seen as in many ways the literary remnant of puritanism.