Description
Book SynopsisCulture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period. Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treatiesa stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records. A noted scholar of the textual conditions of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather's Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin's celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven worksthe record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted eth
Trade Review“Bradford, Winthrop, Bradstreet, Mather, Franklin, Jefferson—over one hundred years of North American colonial treaty-making. McGann has spent the last decade studying early American texts, but this book reflects an entire career of fierce reading.
Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes is an exercise in accuracy, thoroughness, and candor, the values that McGann calls for in scholarship today. His enduring concern with method makes this an important book for readers in the humanities more broadly.” * Anna Brickhouse, author of 'The Unsettlement of America' *
“
Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes is a sophisticated rethinking of both the American literary tradition and the methods that have been used to study it. There is a lesson in this book for those who would study truth and beauty today: study of the human record requires a rigor tempered with a profoundly human sense of the failure immanent to the historiographical enterprise.” * Matt Cohen, author of 'Colonial Mediascapes' *
"What is ultimately at stake for McGann is not merely the contested and fragmented history of early eras but also the very nature of the humanistic endeavor by which contemporary people struggle to comprehend them. Historically capacious yet precise, analytically fluid, and beautifully written, this book models and inspires humanistic scholarship committed to precision, detail, and to truth itself." * Choice *
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Preface
Introduction
1: Scope and Method
2: The Exceptional Encounter
3: On Native Grounds: North American Treaty-Making (ca. 1609–1721)
Part I: Puritan Enlightenment:
Via Dolorosa Prologue
4: William Bradford: The Diary (1620–21), the History (
Of Plymouth Plantation), and the Hebrew Studies
5: John Winthrop: From Journal to History
6: Anne Bradstreet: The World Elsewhere
7: Cotton Mather’s
Magnalia Interchapter 1. Covenant Chain Treaty-Making and Franklin’s Folios
Part II. Secular Enlightenment: The Importance of Failure
8: Franklin’s
Autobiography: Composition as Explanation
9: The Education of Thomas Jefferson
Interchapter 2. The End of
Kaswentha: A Brief History
Part III. Truth and Method
10: The
Arbella Sermon: A Case Study
11: The American Scholar in the Twenty-first Century
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
