Description
Book Synopsis"The Pilgrim and the Bee makes a broad claim about a reading-centered history, reclaiming for this purpose a distinctive body of texts. Brown's analysis marks an important step toward a better history of reading."-David D. Hall, Harvard University
Trade Review"
The Pilgrim and the Bee makes a broad claim about a reading-centered history, reclaiming for this purpose a distinctive body of texts. Brown's analysis marks an important step toward a better history of reading." * David D. Hall, Harvard University *
"As befits a book about books as objects,
The Pilgrim and the Bee adds aesthetic satisfactions to its intellectual pleasures. I suspect that many readers will relate to this beautifully illustrated book as puritan readers related to the devotional steady sellers, marking up Brown's rich array of examples and his provocative readings, and returning to them for further contemplation like the bee of Brown's apt title." *
Journal of American History *
"Brown's work genuinely advances the terms of scholarly debate by combining methodological innovation with a metacritical rigor that is as nuanced as it is compelling." *
American Literature *
"In this book Brown offers sustained, nuanced readings of devotional texts usually relegated to the role of context and provides fresh perspective on more frequently examined genres like jeremiads and elegies. . . . More than simply expanding the early American literary canon with the addition of a few steady sellers, Brown calls attention to the contingencies of the surviving archive and the politics of the canon that emerged from it." *
Early American Literature *
"
The Pilgrim and the Bee is an absorbing work and a real contribution to the study of the material culture of the Puritans and how the religious practices of the community deeply informed their reading." *
Rocky Mountain Review *
""If you have even a passing interest in seeing what the history of the book looks like when it achieves intellectual maturity, then
The Pilgrim and the Bee is certainly worth your time. . . . This important study has implications for a wide range of readers." *
Common-place *
Table of ContentsPreface: A Phenomenology of the Book
Introduction: Toward a Reader-Based Literary History
Chapter 1. The Presence of the Text
Chapter 2. Devotional Steady Sellers and the Conduct of Reading
Chapter 3. Ritual Fasting
Chapter 4. Ritual Mourning
Chapter 5. Race, Literacy, and the Eliot Mission
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
