From Puritanism to Postmodernism

A History of American Literature

Richard Ruland, Malcolm Bradbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317234142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context.

A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.

Part I The Literature of British America

1 The Puritan Legacy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315626154-1

I

A fundamental difference exists between American literature and nearly all the other major literary traditions of the world: it is essentially a modern, recent and international literature. We cannot trace its roots directly back into the mists of American antiquity. We need not hunt its origins in the remote springs of its language and culture, or follow it through from oral to written, then from manuscript to book. The American continent possessed major pre-Columbian civilizations, with a deep heritage of culture, mythology, ritual, chant and poetry. Many American writers, especially recently, have looked to these sources as something essential to American culture, and the extraordinary variety and vision to be found there contribute much to the complexity and increasing multiethnicity of contemporary American experience. But this is not the originating tradition of what we now call American literature. That came from the meeting between the land with its elusive and usually despised “Indians” and the discoverers and settlers who left the developed, literate cultures of Renaissance Europe, first to explore and conquer, then to populate, what they generally considered a virgin continent—a “New World” already promised them in their own mythology, now discovered by their own talent and curiosity.

The New World was not new, nor virgin, nor unsettled. But, arriving in historical daylight, sometimes with aims of conquest, sometimes with a sentimental vision of the “noble savages” or other wonders they might find, these settlers brought with them many of the things that formed the literature we now read. They brought their ideas of history and the world’s purpose; they brought their languages and, above all, the book. The book was both a sacred text, the Bible (to be reinvigorated in the King James Authorized Version of 1611), and a general instrument of expression, record, argument and cultural dissemination. In time, the book became American literature, and other things they shipped with it—from European values and expectations to post-Gutenberg printing technology—shaped the lineage of American writing. So did the early records kept of the encounter and what they made of it. Of course a past was being destroyed as well as a new present gained when these travelers/settlers imposed on the North American continent and its cultures their forms of interpretation and narrative, their Christian history and iconography, their science and technology, their entrepreneurship, settlement practices and modes of commerce. We may deplore this hegemony and seek to reverse it by recovering all we can of the pre-Columbian heritage to find the broader meaning of America. The fact remains that the main direction of the recorded American literary imagination thereafter was formed from the intersection between the European Renaissance mind and the new and wondrous land in the West the settlers found—between the myths they brought and those they learned or constructed after they came.

This America first came into existence out of writing—European writing—and then went on to demand a new writing which fitted the continent’s novelty and strangeness: the problems of its settlement, the harshness and grandeur of its landscape, the mysterious potential of its seemingly boundless open space. But “America” existed in Europe long before it was discovered, in the speculative writings of the classical, the medieval and then the Renaissance mind. American literature began, and the American dream existed, before the actual continent was known. “He invented America; a very great man,” Mademoiselle Nioche says about Columbus in Henry James’s The American (1877). And so, in a sense, he did—except that Columbus was himself following a prototype devised long before, the idea of a western land which was terra incognita, outside and beyond history, pregnant with new meanings for mankind. This place that was not Europe but rather its opposite existed first as a glimmering, an image and an interpretative prospect born from the faith and fantasy of European minds. Out of the stock of classical and religious tradition, out of vague historical memories and fantastic tales, an identity had already been given to the great land mass on the world’s edge which waited to be summoned into history and made part of the divine plan. So, millenarian and Utopian expectations were already attached to this new land. Here might be found Atlantis or Avalon, the Garden of Hesperides, the Seven Cities of Antillia, Canaan or Paradise Renewed, great cities made of gold, fountains of eternal youth. Its wonders would be extraordinary, its people strange and novel. The idea of America as an exceptional place somehow different from all others endures to this day, but it is not a myth of modern American nationalism or recent political rhetoric. It is an invention of Europe, as old as Western history itself.

The America—to give it one of several possible names—that was opened up by exploration and discovery from the fifteenth century on was therefore a testing place for the imaginings Europeans long had of it. Columbus expected to find the East in the West and carried a complex vision to interpret what he found. It, in turn, confirmed some of his expectations and disproved others, in a process to be endlessly repeated as European exploration continued. There were wonders, cities of gold, pristine nature, strange civilizations, unusual savages, the stuff of Eden. There was also danger, death, disease, cruelty and starvation. Myth mixed with actuality, promise with disappointment, and that process has continued too. In effect, America became the space exploration program of an expansive, intensely curious, entrepreneurial and often genocidal era of European adventuring. It stimulated and shaped the direction and expectation of the Western mind, and also filled its treasure chests. It provoked Utopian social hopes, millenarian visions of history, new scientific inquiries, new dreams of mercantilism, profit and greed, new funds for the artistic imagination. “I saw the things which have been brought to the King from the new golden land,” wrote the painter Albrecht Dürer in 1520, after inspecting the tributes from Cortés and Montezuma that Charles V displayed in Brussels before his enthronement as Holy Roman Emperor; “All the days of my life I have seen nothing that gladdened my heart so much as these things.” Such wonders, such promises from the new golden land, entrenched it firmly in the European imagination, where it was to remain; very few travelers from Europe who afterward crossed the Atlantic were without some sense of expectation or wonder as they encountered the strange New World.

Because of this imaginary history, which preceded the real one and all but obliterated the history of those who had lived American lives before the Europeans came, we will never really find a single demarcation point to show us where American writing exactly starts, and certainly not when it became distinctive or broke finally loose from European writing. The invaders came from many different European societies to lands that had indigenous and often highly complex native cultures and a continent spread between the two poles with every conceivable variety of climate, landscape, wildlife, vegetation, natural resource and local evolution. These were complex frontiers, but on them the power of force and of language generally proved to lie with the settlers. Records of these early encounters thus exist, in prodigious variety, in most European languages: narratives of travel and exploration, of religious mission and entrepreneurial activity, letters home, reports to emperors and bishops, telling of wonders seen, dangers risked, coasts charted, hopes justified or dashed, souls saved or lost, tributes taken or evaded, treasures found or missed. From the European point of view, these are the first American books. Often these are practical reports or exhortations to colonization, but at the same time the imaginary myths began to extend; there was, for example, Sir Thomas More’s famed Utopia (1516), which drew on Amerigo Vespucci’s recorded voyages to picture an ideal future world. In a Britain anxious about maintaining and developing its sea power and its outposts abroad, the stories of the English navigators, told by the Elizabethan diplomat and promoter of colonization Richard Hakluyt in his Voyages and Discoveries (1589–1600), created intense excitement. They were expanded by Samuel Purchas in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrims (1625); and such books, all over Europe, fed contemporary mythologizing and shaped literature. They passed their influence on to Tasso and Montaigne, Spenser and Shakespeare, John Donne, Michael Drayton and Andrew Marvell, all of whom wrote of the wonders of the “brave new world,” or the “Newfounde land.” American images have constantly been refracted in European art and writing, and so have the images traded in reverse, of Europe in America. That is another reason why even to this day it is hard to identify a separate space for American literature which makes it distinct from the arts of Europe.

Even when there was an actual America, with firm settlement, the process continued. Naturally, the imaginary story now began to change, taking on specificity, definition, geographical actuality, a stronger sense of real experience. Early explorers’ accounts of navigation, exploration, privation and wonder began yielding to annals, geographical records, social, scientific and naturalist observations. When the first permanent English settlement was founded under difficult and dangerous circumstances at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, it had its recorder, Captain John Smith. Both a practical sea captain and a romantic adventurer, a promoter of colonization forced to become savior of the colony, Smith told the tale in his brief A True Relation of . . . Virginia (London, 1608), which dispels some of the golden myths but develops others, not least some to do with himself. Smith emphasizes chivalry, adventure, missionary intention and the potentials of the rich American plenty; he also emphasizes practicality, privation and dangerous conflict with the Indians. Still, the story of his rescue from danger by the virtuous Indian princess Pocahontas—he made it yet more exotic in his Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (London, 1624)—gave Virginia and North America its first great romantic tale in English, creating a version of the Noble and Remediable Savage that prospered freely in the European mind. Smith’s mapping, both actual and written, of American possibilities continued. Sent by the Virginia Company to explore the coast farther north, he gave it the name “New England,” attached British names to many of its unsettled areas and recorded it all in his influential A Description of New England (London, 1616)—a reasonably accurate annals about the practical problems of travel, settlement and husbandry, detailing coasts, terrain, climate, crops and prospects for cultivation. But Smith’s book was also full of American promise, defining a heroic and even divine mission for those who would undertake plantation’s great task: “What so truely suits with honour and honesty as the discovering things unknown: erecting towns, peopling countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching virtue; and gain to our native mother country a kingdom to attend her.”

As author of the first English book written in America, Smith influenced much to come. He shows us both the need to narrate the new and the problems involved in such narration. Introducing the word into new space, he tries to give plot and purpose to travel and the landscape. Like all early records, his is shaped by Renaissance theories of history, Christian faith in mission, patriotic ideas of settlement, moral notions of the value of plantation, cultivation and honest toil. The excitement comes in his sense of crossing the strange frontier between the Old World and the New. Smith himself could not be sure whether his story marked a genuine new beginning, but his successors were more certain, for the English colonies he speculated about soon multiplied: Plymouth Plantation in 1620 and Massachusetts Bay in 1630, following Smith’s own maps of settlement; Maryland in 1634, Rhode Island in 1636, New York in 1664, Pennsylvania in 1681. Among these settlers were some who truly believed this was the new beginning, a fresh start for history and religion, a millenarian enterprise. They were the Puritans, who, determined to maintain the purity of their separatist Protestant faith, did aim to begin anew and find in that process of erecting towns, peopling countries, teaching virtue and reforming things unjust a truly fresh start. The “Pilgrim Fathers” who—though hunting for Virginia—made landfall at Cape Cod in 1620 to settle Plymouth Plantation were following Smith, but with an urgent sense of independence. Like Smith, they chronicled all they did; indeed the larger colony soon to develop at Massachusetts Bay brought the technology of printing and soon produced an American book on American soil, the Bay Psalme Book of 1640. And, though they wrote first for themselves and their colonial successors, they also, like Smith, had in mind readers in Europe; they were still writing for English eyes, seeking to convert English minds.

What they wrote, prolifically, was another kind of beginning to the American story, another kind of narration that gave shape and significance to the process of plantation, settlement, social development. But now the voyager was not the explorer or the planter but the Pilgrim, entering new space and new history. The plot was providential; God guides these encounters between the traveler and the not yet written New World. The myth remains shaped by European sources, but now one source above all, the Bible, and especially its opening chapters, Genesis and Exodus, the tale of the Chosen People and the Promised Land. For the Puritans (different traditions shaped the narratives of the other non-Puritan colonies) the essential tale was a religious one of travail and wandering, with the Lord’s guidance, in quest of a high purpose and a millennial history. When Puritans wrote of the New World and the allegory of the Puritan diaspora, they were, by following out the biblical types, telling nothing less than the tale of God’s will revealing itself in history.

The Puritan imagination, it was acknowledged, was central to the nature of American writing. One reason for this was that it brought to the New World not only a Judaic sense of wonder and millenarian promise—the “American dream” that is still recalled in so much modern literature, not least in the famous ending of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in 1925—but a vision of the task and nature of writing itself. Puritan narratives defined a shape for the writing of America, but they also questioned how and whether language could reveal the extraordinary experience. As a result, from the very beginnings America became a testing place of language and narrative, a place of search for providential meanings and hidden revelations, part of a lasting endeavor to discover the intended nature and purpose of the New World. The Puritan millennium never did reveal itself directly, and so the task continued—long after early plantations evolved into permanent settlements, Puritanism turned into hard-working enterprise, relations with Europe and England became increasingly distant and estranged and the thirteen American colonies finally declared their independence and became the First New Nation. That New Nation then turned westward, to contemplate afresh the wide continent that continued to provide a sense of wonder and the promise of providential possibility. As it did so, the power and capabilities of language and narrative remained a central matter. Slowly, these historical turns created the modern, discovering writing that we now call American literature.

II

“I must begin at the very root and rise,” wrote William Bradford to begin Of Plimouth Plantation in 1630. A personal journal, much used by his contemporaries, it was completed by 1650 but not printed until 1856. Bradford was a leader of the Mayflower Separatists and governor of Plymouth for thirty years after its settlement; his account reveals his determination to set on durable record the entire pilgrim story—of departure, voyage, arrival, settlement, development and lasting dedication to God’s purpose in history. Of these events and intentions, it offers the most vivid and vital description we have, in part because both its factuality and faith are driven by a fundamental conviction about the nature of style and language. Bradford is, he says, determined to render his account “in the plaine style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things.” What the simple truth was was as plain to Bradford as to any other Puritan, whether one straining within the confines of the Established Church in Britain or forced abroad as a hounded Separatist for insisting on radical purification of religious belief and practice. That truth had special application, however, to those who had fled from the persecutions of British magistrates to the security of Dutch tolerance, only to realize they must flee once more if they were to preserve their religious and national identity. For them the voyage to New England was an act of faith, derived from the reading of providential signs in contingent events, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION
• FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION
• PREFACE
• PART I THE LITERATURE OF BRITISH AMERICA
• 1 The Puritan Legacy
• 2 Awakening and Enlightenment
• PART II FROM COLONIAL OUTPOST TO CULTURAL PROVINCE
• 3 Revolution and (In)dependence
• 4 American Naissance
• 5 Yea-saying and Nay-saying
• PART III NATIVE AND COSMOPOLITAN CROSSCURRENTS: FROM LOCAL COLOR TO REALISM AND NATURALISM
• 6 Secession and Loyalty
• 7 Muckrakers and Early Moderns
• PART IV MODERNISM IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN
• 8 Outland Darts and Homemade Worlds
• 9 The Second Flowering
• 10 Radical Reassessments
• 11 Strange Realities, Adequate Fictions
• EPILOGUE — AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY IN 1998: A CONVERSATION WITH JOSEF JAŘAB AND RICHARD RULAND IN PRAGUE
• INDEX