Joy and Dread among the Early Americanists

Abstract

P ) HILIP F. Gura has for a second time performed the office of community augur, supplying a summary view of what was, is, and will be among the scholars of early American literature. He is peculiarly suited to the task. Having edited Early American Literature for the past decade, he has occupied a prospect from which most of the developments in the field stood revealed. Then, too, he has made prophecy one of his areas of scholarly expertise, parsing the visions of the most extravagant of early America's seers and dreamers. 1 Gura's message suits the expiration of the millennium: he announces the end of the traditional story about early America. Although the dissolution of consensus history has been reality more than prospect in other fields of American historical inquiry, when Gura first proclaimed it at the Prospects Conference in i989, it was a disconcerting outlook for many literary scholars-particularly coming from one trained at Harvard in the Novanglian mysteries. The story of the Puritan genetics of American civic culture, elaborated from Perry Miller to Sacvan Bercovitch, was a congenial truth, comfortable in the mouth from frequent repetition. It possessed a narrative economy and a moral seriousness that lent it aesthetic potency. Yet Gura was one of that number who had difficulty seeing a Puritan orthodoxy that could supply a coherent origin for an American civil religion. A student of ranters, Gortonists, fifth monarchists, and other enthusiasts who peopled the Anglo-American religious landscape, Gura was supremely conscious of how much the traditional story did not tell. He had ears to hear the earliest soundings of what would become a clamor of other voices telling other tales. In i999, Gura no longer needs to speak with oracular fervor. He can adopt the circumspect tone of the priestly historians rather than harangue like the heralds of woe and promise, for the end of consensus history is a fait accompli, a historical matter, a prediction come true. A trio of surrogates performs the vatic tasks in Gura's Prospect: the criers of woe are Richard De Prospo and Peter Carafiol; William Spengemann serves as the