For generations, scholars have imagined American puritans as religious enthusiasts, fleeing persecution, finding refuge in Massachusetts, and founding 'America'. The puritans have been read as a product of New England and the origin of American exceptionalism. This History challenges the usual understanding of American puritans, offering new ways of reading their history and their literary culture. Together, an international team of authors make clear that puritan America cannot be thought of apart from Native America, and that its literature is also grounded in Britain, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and networks that spanned the globe. Each chapter focuses on a single place, method, idea, or context to read familiar texts anew and to introduce forgotten or neglected voices and writings. A History of American Puritan Literature is a collaborative effort to create not a singular literary history, but a series of interlocked new histories of American puritan literature.

This book will be the field-defining statement on American puritan literature, presenting a clear and accessible introduction to puritan studies in the twenty-first century.

About the Author
Kristina Bross is Professor of English at Purdue University. A past president of the Society of Early Americanists (SEA), Kristina Bross has published articles in numerous scholarly journals and book collections on early American literature, archival studies, and pedagogy. She is the author of Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians and Colonial America (2004) and Co-editor of Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (2008; Hilary Wyss, co-editor). Her book Future History: Global Fantasies in American and British Writings (2017) was named as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2018. Abram Van Engen is Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. His articles have been published in multiple scholarly journals, as well as Avidly, Comment Magazine, Common-place, The Conversation, Humanities Magazine, Religion and Politics, Salon.com, and other venues. In 2012, he won the Walter Muir Whitehill Prize in Early American History. He is the author of Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow-Feeling in Early New England (2015) and City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (2020). His research and writing have won a Benjamin F. Stevens Fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society, as well as a Faculty Fellowship and a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Reviews
'Teachers of early American literature will likely find their own approaches to Puritan literature benefit from the straightforward, substantial, and lucid essays ... Highly recommended.' G. D. MacDonald, Choice
'... a new paradigm for understanding and organizing a range of textual and nontextual media largely produced in settler colonial New England.' Teresa Toulouse, Early American Literature
'In a series of masterful, erudite, and original essays, the volume dismantles the seemingly intractable connection many are still inclined to make between the puritans, the birth of the nation, and policy decisions driven by racial, ethnic, and religious animosity. ... Each essay offers new angles for scholarship even as it manages to speak to a more general audience of students. By uncovering new voices in the archive and recontextualizing old ones among the diverse others who peopled the puritans' world, A History of American Puritan Literature invaluably reassesses the puritan past without losing sight of the uses to which that past has been put in a series of US presents.' Nan Goodman, American Literary History



Book Information
ISBN 9781108840033
Author Kristina Bross
Format Hardback
Page Count 384
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 670g
Dimensions(mm) 236mm * 159mm * 24mm