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Perry Miller (1905–1963)

Författare till The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry

39+ verk 2,650 medlemmar 7 recensioner

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Verk av Perry Miller

The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry (1956) — Redaktör — 337 exemplar
Errand into the Wilderness (1956) 304 exemplar
The American transcendentalists, their prose and poetry (1957) — Redaktör — 187 exemplar
The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1950) — Redaktör — 169 exemplar
Jonathan Edwards (1949) 163 exemplar
Major writers of America (1962) 86 exemplar
The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings Vol. 1 (1963) — Redaktör — 76 exemplar
Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, Vol. 2 (1963) — Redaktör — 62 exemplar
Nature's nation (1967) 15 exemplar

Associerade verk

Walden / Civil Disobedience (1849) — Efterord, vissa utgåvor7,626 exemplar
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1900) — Efterord, vissa utgåvor1,556 exemplar
Images or Shadows of Divine Things (1948) — Redaktör, vissa utgåvor12 exemplar

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The biographical summary of Miller is interesting. A man who got his PhD in an era where 1 year of undergrad work, followed by three years of grad work after a hiatus traveling the world, could quite directly land tenure at Harvard. One thinks of Miller as a tweedy Harvard professor in the "consensus" era of historiography. Trapped inside the minutia of high culture debates, he seems one caught in the amber of historiographical time. Perhaps, as Stephen Foster implied in "New England and the Challenge of Heresy" (WMQ 1981), "division" and "dissention" did have an intimate association with "decline." What did Miller accomplish? He rescued the Puritans from the hands of the Progressive Historians, who had relegated them to the positions of demagogues and hypocrites. In the words of Bernard Bailyn, he "recast the image of New England origins from one of hypocrisy, savage intolerance and the stultification of the senses, to one of intellectual and spiritual splendor." (Bailyn's review of Errand into the Wilderness in Essex Institute).

It is indeed a different world in the sense of academic sociology, but also in terms of the types of things that interest scholars. As Hall points out in his "On Common Ground," the interest in social history of the 1960s and 70s certainly refocused the profession away from the close textual exegesis of Perry Miller's New England Mind. As social history came into fashion, so intellectual history went out. Even with the literary turn of the 80s and 90s, when we returned to the study of the Mathers' writings, it is more to understand their relationship with the popular press than it is to probe the depths of Calvinist - Puritan intellectual continuities. Within New England Studies, the impact of Gender (masculinity as well as femininity) have impacted our view of the clergy and interactions with the laity as they changed over time. See C Dayton (Taking the Trade). Today we celebrate difference, division and dissention. We sing with Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass ... "Do I contradict myself? So I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes" And we seek out the sources of social and cultural contest. We glory in our differences and in the genius of America in containing all of this ...
… (mer)
 
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mdobe | 1 annan recension | Jan 14, 2018 |
Perry Miller's "Errand Into the Wilderness" more than any other book I've read in a long time makes you realize sometimes how little education our educational institutions actually provide. Think of the Puritans. The word conjures up images of earnest, hard-working folk bedecked in golden buckles and ruffles eager to spread their moral superiority to anyone within earshot. We think of their biggest accomplishment as managing to survive disease and pestilence for so long, despite their backward ways. The history we know of the Puritans is a history of events - things they did, their names, their travels. Miller's fascinating book opens up Puritan history for those interested in intellectual history - a history of ideas, theology, and polity. And what a fascinating world he uncovers.

While the main focus here is Puritanism, Miller does occasionally do a bit of wandering; some of the latter essays explore Emerson and the formation of American nationalist ideology. There are ten essays, all of which are full of the enticing, meaty history of ideas, so I won't be able to cover all the ground of the book here, though I would like to give a short précis of some of those essays which I thought to be the most impressive.

The book's title comes from one Samuel Danforth, whose sermon "A Brief Recognition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness" sets the existential, searching tone whose tenor can be found in each one of these essays. In the title essay, Miller notes the dual meaning of the word "errand." It can mean a task done by an inferior for a superior, or it can refer to the task alone, the very action itself. The first generation of Puritans to set foot on North American soil never thought of themselves as Americans. They were just Englishmen and Englishwomen whose task was to see to it that the "errand" of the Reformation could be enacted on Earth. In other words, they saw themselves very much performing an errand in the first sense. After the English Civil War had failed to turn the heads of the world to their glorious City on a Hill, they were left with a vast wilderness. These essays are how the Puritans fashioned a sense of meaning, and eventually, in time, American identity, out of those very raw ingredients whose presence still make themselves felt in American life - Calvinist theology, a sense of community, and profound intolerance.

"The Marrow of Puritan Divinity" is one of the longest, and best, essays in the collection. It covers the shift from strict fundamentalist Calvinism to covenantal theology that took place sometime within the early part of the seventeenth century. In 1550, strict Calvinism was still acceptable. The Scientific Revolution was still far off, and the abject nature of human beings was still de rigueur. The absolute and capricious power of God could still accept or reject human souls according to His whim. By 1650, however, the unscientific worldview that would allow this kind of God had, in some respects, given away. Theology had better learn to justify the ways of God to man or else risk losing some of its influence. Some of the first important Puritan theologians - including Cotton, Hooker, Shepard, and Bulkley - began to constitute a new school that broke from Calvinism in one important way: the incorporation of covenantal theology. No longer, according to these theologians, did you have to believe in God despite his mercurial nature as you used to. Now when you professed a belief in God, you and He entered into a covenant - he turned into a God who was capable of making and keeping a promise. "He has become a God chained - by His own consent, it is true, but nevertheless a God restricted and circumscribed - a God who can be counted upon, a God who can be lived with. Man can always know where God is and what he intends" (63). In a lot of ways this essay forms the ideological core of the book, since Miller will discuss in the later essays many of the ways in which the covenant was absolutely essential in understanding Puritan civil society, church, and state. In fact, Winthrop's constitutional ideas were based upon the idea of men coming together and forming an earthly covenant.

In "Nature and the National Ego," Miller again uses the trope of the wilderness and connects it to Emerson and American identity writ large. He says that, in contrast to Europe's "Nature" (which is effeminate, inferior, derivative), America has founded itself the original, masculine quintessence of the wilderness. To support this idea, he points out that many Americans intellectuals in the nineteenth century began to worry about the possible effects of industrialization and the encroachment of "civilization," fearing that its appearance might be proportional to the uniquely American identity that might they might have to cede. He goes so far as to say that "if there be such a thing as an American character, it took shape under the molding influence of the conceptions of Nature and civilization" (210).

Both chronologically and ideologically, these are the two essays that couch the rest of this wonderful collection. I would recommend these essays for anyone in search of an alternate view to the prevailing idea of America as being originally founded on religious tolerance and individualism, or anyone excited by old-fashioned American intellectual history. This is some of the best of its kind.
… (mer)
 
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kant1066 | Oct 14, 2011 |
This is complicated and difficult but fascinating. It is the intellectual history of New England. This volume marks the transition from Puritan to Yankee.
 
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Carolfoasia | Oct 12, 2011 |
If you start this book and are immediately taken aback by the author's apparent assumption that you know who Charles Grandison Finney was and are thoroughly conversant with the Great Revival of 1740-45, have patience. All will be revealed, but in its own good time and according to its own logic. It's actually very refreshing to read an author who writes as if the reader were fully as intelligent and cultured as he is, even though, in the case of the present reviewer, he would likely become disillusioned very quickly.… (mer)
 
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jburlinson | Oct 10, 2010 |

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Verk
39
Även av
4
Medlemmar
2,650
Popularitet
#9,690
Betyg
3.9
Recensioner
7
ISBN
57

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