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The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume One: 1590-1820. SACVAN BERCOVITCH, General Editor. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xiii, 829 pp. $69.95.
Be advised, you there with your plastic at the ready: Volume One of the Cambridge History of American Literature is not a history of American literature (neither the thing nor the idea) as seen from Cambridge University. It is a collection of five monographs by five different authors, dealing with five different topics, addressing different audiences, and entertaining different views of their subjects--none of them within missile range of the Cam.
Following a brief introduction by the General Editor, Myra Jehlen looks at selections from "The Literature of Colonization," ranging from Columbus's Diario to the journals of Lewis and Clark, in order to describe the textual invention of America as a land divinely, naturally, or historically promised to its European invaders and denied to its native inhabitants. Jehlen's essay is addressed to readers laboring under the misapprehension that America existed from the beginning in its present ideal form, was discovered whole by Columbus, and thereafter steadily achieved its entelechy as the temple of freedom, justice, and enlightenment; readers, that is, who need instruction regarding the gradual but relentless expropriation of native lands and extermination of their inhabitants--the material and ideological process by which our America was created.
In the second monograph, Emory Elliott takes us back to Puritan New England to survey representative writings of that community against the backdrop of its historical career, from the English Reformation, through the Puritan migrations to New England, to the Great Awakening. Elliott aims his essay at intelligent students who have heard of Puritanism but know little about it except that it is a forbidding, unlovely subject and who can therefore do with some basic information regarding its origins, development, internal problems, and singular accomplishments, as well as its hotly debated status among scholars and its persistent appeal to Americans generally.
David Shields then expands the field of historical vision to describe a heretofore little-known network of cosmopolitan men and women scattered throughout eighteenth-century British America, from Barbados to Boston, but united by their common devotion to, and exchange of, what they called belles lettres, a polite literature aimed at the promotion of...