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1 - Nostalgia and nationalism in New England literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Christopher D'Addario
Affiliation:
Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania
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Summary

I would like to begin, as is our convention these days, with a story – the story, aptly for an exploration of exile, of a passage. The early Puritan settlers in America, of course, told many stories about passages, the majority feeding into diverse foundational myths that envisioned a pious passage of legions of conscientious souls to the shores of the New World. Yet, while I am ultimately concerned with this mass movement of individuals whose motives assuredly were untidily complex, I would like instead to begin, somewhat heretically, with the passage of an object. In doing so, I wish to emphasize the transatlantic and the eventual rather than the American and the originary. That is, whereas the story of the movement of a people, the Puritans, can easily resolve itself into the story of the beginnings and evolution of the American way, the story of the movement of objects must describe the complex interconnectedness of the English Atlantic world. Whereas the Great Migration is most often considered, somewhat inaccurately, unidirectional, the migration of objects must comprehend the multilateral and encompass not only the British Isles and New England, but also the Chesapeake, the West Indies, Newfoundland and Hudson Bay, the Azores and southern Europe. It is not surprising that one of the strongest statements for an interconnected and mutually dependent Atlantic world, Ian Steele's The English Atlantic, often focuses on the traffic in goods: tobacco, molasses, lumber, fish, and news and information.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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