This book is a study of New England literature during the years when it developed from an amateur pastime to its peak of distinction, the socalled New England Renaissance of about 1830–60. I shall explore the foundations, the unfolding, and the literary results of this great change, giving special attention to major writers – Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Dickinson particularly – but surveying them in relation to a host of other figures and to the conventions, values, and institutions that shaped their work in common. I hope in the process to contribute to the understanding of the authors and genres discussed, of the ideology of provincialism in general and the New England strain in particular, the phenomenon of literary emergence, and the ongoing attempt to chart a course for American literary history.

The following chapters approach New England letters from two complementary vantage points.

From our survey of the broader contours of the New England imagination we turn now to its regionally oriented aspects, its historical literature and its literature of place. These, by and large, exhibit the same primary traits so far identified: a concentration on poetry and prose, as opposed to drama; a strong rhetorical and didactic element, frequently offset by aesthetic distancing; a tendency to achieve originality by working disruptively within conventionalized patterns; a fondness for playing the formal off against the vernacular; and a markedly Protestant ideology. With these as instruments, New England writers re-created their region as a literary artifact. In this chapter we begin examination of the key ingredient, the myth of Puritan antecedence.

As we shall see, it was during our period that America's stereotypes about the Puritans fully crystallized and began to exert a fascination for creative writers that still runs strong today. The notion of America's Puritan legacy, in both its Jekyll and its Hyde aspects, is the legacy of the writers we are about to survey.

By “provincial gothic,” I mean the use of gothic conventions to anatomize the pathology of regional culture. Although the phrase is uncommon, most readers will immediately and rightly associate it with such works as Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tilbury Town poems, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and the “southern gothic” tradition exemplified by the fiction of William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. The student who wishes to understand New England's place in American literary history as a whole will have a special interest in such writing, since New Englanders produced the first sizable body of it in this country and since provincial gothic constitutes America's most distinctive contribution to the gothic tradition as a whole.

Chapters 1 and 2 took note of some of the economic and cultural factors that enabled New England's literature to develop. To enable, however, is not in itself to cause. Our charting of these developments only raises anew the question of why they should have culminated so successfully. From the early national standpoint, American literary emergence seemed bafflingly slow; but for us the question should rather be, How could America's classic literary works have been written at a time when the very concept of authorial vocation had hardly begun to crystallize?

This chapter will address the issue of how, at a time when American authors were ostensibly lagging behind their British counterparts, the best of them were able to compose works that today impress many readers not only as great literature but even as in some respects more modern than the masterpieces of Victorian fiction and poetry.

The literary reinvention of Puritanism was only part of the more far-eaching project of articulating all of New England culture and its institutions in literary form. This larger project preceded and outlasted the vogue of historical writing, at its height between 1820 and 1850. This chapter and the next four will examine some characteristic ways in which New England writing codified the regional sense of place.

Here, as before, the Revolutionary era supplies a somewhat arbitrary yet justifiable starting point. It is arbitrary in the sense that the New England landscape and ethos had already been mapped in some detail by early explorers, by Puritan historians, and by diarists and travelers like Samuel Sewall and Sarah Kemble Knight. It is justifiable, however, in that post-Revolutionary literary nationalist aesthetics tended temporarily to suppress and erase old-style colonial attachments and to create at least the illusion that any future regionalism would have to build itself anew.

That American thought before 1865 was markedly religiocentric is a scholarly commonplace. Such was especially true of New England, owing to the Puritan imprint, which Enlightenment rationalism did not erase. Indeed, since the Reformation no region of the English-speaking world has probably come closer to producing a body of writing that bears out Northrop Frye's dictum that the Bible is the master text to which all Western literature may ultimately be referred. To affirm this is not necessarily to insist that religious motives were the sole or the primary determiners of human behavior even in the most pristine era of New England's settlement. Revisionist historians have argued with some cogency that the documents on which intellectual history à la Perry Miller has based its theologically oriented reconstructions of the New England mind are a “rarefied form of cognitive speculation conducted by the members of a specially trained elite” that understate the importance of other motivating factors, social and economic, even for the elite itself. This argument, however, though valuable as a corrective, is even less satisfactory as a comprehensive formulation of Puritan thought. “Compared with Americans of the 18th or the 19th century,” Daniel Boorstin commonsensically remarks, “the Puritans surely were theologyminded.”

The story of New England letters between the Revolution and the Civil War reads in many ways like a straightforward narrative of growth and improvement. At the start, we find literature composed by a small number of genteel amateurs in Connecticut and eastern Massachusetts, all minor figures by any high standard, confining themselves to poetry and nonfictional prose. In fiction and drama, hardly anything had yet appeared, and nothing memorable. New England's major towns, mostly scattered along the Atlantic Coast from Portland to New Haven, had newspapers that local scribblers used as outlets but no literary magazines and no publishing industry as such. Circulation of books and pamphlets was for the most part local.

By 1865 the situation had changed dramatically. Spread throughout every New England state, although concentrated especially in the Boston area, were hundreds of practicing creative writers, some of whom even earned their living from literature. The best had produced work in every genre (except drama) that today is recognized as excellent. Literary institutions were solidly in place.

The preceding chapter described premodern New England verse as a “poetry of regulated moral statement.” The next two chapters should further help to explain why.

One reason was that the era between the Revolution and the Civil War was the self-styled “golden age of American oratory.” The prestige of oratory overshadowed that of poetry, not to mention fiction and drama, and resulted in the persistence, well into the Romantic period, of the Neoclassical tendency to define belles lettres as a branch of rhetoric.

Oratory, as F. O. Matthiessen observes, was the “one branch of literature in which America … had a formed tradition” by the turn of the nineteenth century. The early national sense of literary inferiority did not extend to the area of public speaking. Samuel L. Knapp, in the first extended survey of American literary culture (1829), boasted that in a half century the nation had generated more “distinguished orators and rhetoricians” than Athens had produced in a thousand years. Even more sober witnesses generally agreed that whatever the state of American literature might be, American oratory was something to brag about.

The generalizations made in Chapters 2 and 3 about the rise of literary professionalism in New England were based on study of the lives and careers of several hundred authors, examined with a special eye to career patterns, according to period (early national versus antebellum), gender, class, and literary stature (“major” versus “minor” authors). This Appendix presents my findings more systematically than has been done so far in this book, by means of an adaptation of some of the more elementary quantitative methods of recent social history, whose unfamiliarity to many literary scholars will, I hope, prove stimulating rather than repellent.

To study authorial careers in the aggregate tells one little about the aesthetic individuality of literary texts. Such study can be valuable, however, in preventing naive judgments about the uniqueness or typicality of the handful of writers and works in each period on which literary scholarship naturally concentrates.

In this chapter and the next, we turn from historical accounts of the Puritan past to a more direct study of belletristic portrayals. As we do, the task of understanding the historical dimension of period thinking becomes trickier than ever. If self-styled works of history often seem more like the reflections of fancy than of fact, the relationship between a piece of creative writing and its historical referent is even more elusive. A work of history is already a textualization of the original phenomena. A work of historical fiction is, then, a combination of retextualized source material and artistic elaboration (mediated by literary convention, of course). Small wonder that theories of historical fiction do not agree as to whether such writing can meaningfully be defined in terms of the sort of historical knowledge it furnishes.