Description
Book SynopsisNEW ENGLAND BEYOND CRITICISM
Elisa New's book is a remarkable achievement. It is very rare that a critic manages to ask what seem exactly the right questions, then to answer them in a lively, brilliant, evocative, and supremely intelligent prose.
Charles F. Altieri, University of California
Elisa New is a refreshing voice among critics and historians of literature. She has a keen sense of the nature of New England and its deep spiritual resources, reaching back to the Puritans, moving through the great nineteenth-century expressions of interior landscapes and visions. This is a book I welcome and celebrate.
Jay Parini, Middlebury College
Literary criticism of the past thirty years has undercut what the canonizers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw as the fundamental role of early New England in the development of American literary culture. And yet, a determination in literary circles to topple perceived Ivy League elitism a
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Introduction: New England Beyond Criticism 1
Part I
Excitations: Protestant Ups and Downs 21
2 Variety as Religious Experience: Four Case Studies: Dickinson, Edwards, Taylor, and Cotton 23
3 The Popularity of Doom: From Wigglesworth, Poe, and Stowe through The Da Vinci Code 47
4 “I Take—No Less than Skies—”: Dickinson’s Flights 75
Part II
Congregations: Rites of Assembly 103
5 Lost in the Woods Again: Coming Home to Wilderness in Bradford, Thoreau, Frost, and Bishop 105
6 Growing Up a Goodman: Hawthorne’s Way 140
7 “Shall Not Perish from the Earth”: The Counting of Souls in Jewett, Du Bois, E.A. Robinson, and Frost 160
8 Disinheriting New England: Robert Lowell’s Reformations 201
Part III
Matriculations: In Academic Terms 225
9 Winter at the Corner of Quincy and Harvard: The Brothers James 227
10 Upon a Peak in Beinecke: The Beauty of the Book in the Poetry of Susan Howe 235
11 Balm for the Prodigal: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead 265
12 A Fable for Critics: Autobiographical Epilogue 279
Index 308
