Doctrine and Difference: Essays in the Literature of New England

The enduring power of many antebellum American texts is derived from Puritanism. From Melville’s preposterous but irresponsible quarrels with God to Hawthorne’s instructed yet edgy evocations of earlier New England, to Dickinson’s finely turned little blasphemies. Can one imagine that such texts were written anywhere but in the latter days of Puritanism? Doctrine and Difference shows how the spirit and forms of liberalism are a necessary but by no means sufficient explanation for the flowering of literature in this period. The colonialist writers were attempting to have things their own provincial way amidst an air of rejection by the cosmopolitan literary establishment. Capturing the violence of repression, the energy required to meet its moral argument head on, and the disease of embattled survival, this book shows how these works are in many ways the literary remnants of Puritanism.