So Who Killed Colonial Literary History?

Abstract

S OMEBODY certainly did. Philip Gura points out Greene and Pole found no room in Colonial British America for an essay on literature, leading one to believe literature had nothing significant to do with new history of the early modern era. He might also have noted the Greene and Pole index lists no Edward Taylor and no Philip Freneau. How in 489 pages could the most esteemed historians of the period have missed America's first genuine poet and its most virile Revolutionary satirist? Something is clearly amiss here, but I do not think Gura's otherwise fine essay locates it. The problem lies less with the social historians than with their literary counterparts. How came to be affects Gura's analysis. One has to think very carefully in order to remember anything about colonial literary history between Moses Coit Tyler (i878) and Vernon L. Parrington (I927). That was no surprise to Parrington, who saw the field as possessed by intellectual wimps and sissies. Enough milktoast! Enough genteel tradition! Let us have solid beef and puddings, masculine food, politics, the raw stuff gives one's intellectual appetite an edge. None of your effete aesthetics! Main Currents in American Thought showed us brilliantly what he meant. In I939 two very important publications appeared. The first was Perry Miller's New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, which took powerful exception to Parrington, showing the intellectual sinew of Puritan thought. No sissy stuff here, just tough meat. Still, Miller reinforced Parrington's attack on poetry. At the end of his very fine chapter on Plain Style he warned: criticism which endeavors to discuss Puritan writings as part of literary history, which seeks to estimate them from any 'aesthetic' point of view, is approaching the materials in a sprit they were never intended to accommodate, and is in danger of concluding with pronouncements which are wholly irrelevant to the designs and motives of the writers. Up to the point at which their rhetorical theory permitted a care for form, the form may be criticized, but hardly beyond that (p. 362). Until the mid-i96os it was impossible to think outside of Miller's magisterial dicta, including this one. What could literary scholars suffering from seizures of New Criticism do with a literature they were virtually prohibited from practicing upon? That brings us to the second major publication of I939, the Rockland