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Sympathetic Puritans

By Engen, Abram van

Sympathetic Puritans

By Engen, Abram van

0 - Default Title
Description
Revising dominant accounts of Puritanism and challenging the literary history of sentimentalism, Sympathetic Puritans argues that a Calvinist theology of sympathy shaped the politics, religion, rhetoric, and literature of early New England. Scholars have often understood and presented sentimentalism as a direct challenge to stern and stoic Puritan forebears; the standard history traces a cult of sensibility back to moral sense philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, not Puritan New England. Abram C. Van Engen has unearthed pervasive evidence of sympathy in a large archive of Puritan sermons, treatises, tracts, poems, journals, histories, and captivity narratives. He demonstrates how two types of sympathy -- the active command to fellow-feel (a duty), as well as the passive sign that could indicate salvation (a discovery) -- permeated Puritan society and came to define the very boundaries of English culture, affecting conceptions of community, relations with Native Americans, and the development of American literature. Van Engen re-examines the Antinomian Controversy, conversion narratives, transatlantic relations, Puritan missions, Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative -- and Puritan culture more generally -- through the lens of sympathy. Demonstrating and explicating a Calvinist theology of sympathy in seventeenth-century New England, the book reveals the religious history of a concept that has previously been associated with more secular roots.
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
326
Release Date:
2015-02-25
Publication Date:
2015-02-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0199379637
ISBN13:
9780199379637
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
655 g
Height:
161 cm
Width:
240 cm
Thickness:
22 cm
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