Colonial Nonfiction: On the Road to Literary Awareness

Abstract

Charles Berryman. From Wilderness to Wasteland: The Trial of the Puritan God in the American Wilderness. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979. 214 + ix pp. Wayne Franklin. Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 252 + xiii pp. Steven E. Kagle. American Diary Literature 1620-17')'/. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979. 203 pp. Donald P. Wharton. In the Trough of the Sea: Selected American Sea-Deliverance Narratives. 1610-1766. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. 295 + xxi pp. When a culture lacks confidence in its literary accomplishments it suffers a sort of cultural paranoia that directs all critical attention toward a limited range of generic forms. The lyric poem, the novel, the drama, the long verse narrative—these forms and few others have proven the vehicles of previous great literature in English; hence, so the thinking goes, when an exceptional work surfaces, it surely will find expression in one of these genres. During this initial diffident period, which may last for centuries, nonfiction will almost certainly be ignored and considered of mere pragmatic utility, without esthetic or literary interest. But once convinced of the value of its imaginative literature, the culture is free to indulge itself in this nonfiction which, although among the first writings to emerge from a society, is the last to be examined by literary scholars. Put under critical scrutiny, exploration accounts, private diaries and travel narratives loom up as significant aids to the comprehension of subsequent and more highly evolved forms of expression; records that had once appealed solely to the historian begin to intrigue the man of letters, not only as examples of cultural and literary history, but as intrinsically important works possessing self-contained rhetoric, language and form.