Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing

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The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation of a unique culture. Here Jim Egan offers an unprecedented look at how early modern American writers helped make this notion of experience so powerful that we now take it as a given rather than as the product of hard-fought rhetorical battles waged over ways of imagining one's relationship to a larger social community. In order to show how our modern notion of experience emerges from a historical change that experience itself could not have brought about, he turns to works by seventeenth-century writers in New England and reveals the ways in which they authorized experience, ultimately producing a rhetoric distinctive to the colonies and supportive of colonialism. Contributors: Author: Egan, Jim Publisher: Princeton University Press Publication date: February 2001 Number of pages: History Content language: English Review upcoming, please call back soon! Our customer review area is currently under construction, please call back soon! Search more ebooks within the same categories: Literary Criticism  :  American - General

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