The Double Voice of Early American Literature

A. Owen Aldridge. Early American Literature: A Comparatist Approach. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. xi + 323 pp. Sargent Bush, Jr. The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventures in Two Worlds. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. x + 387 pp. Patricia Caldwell. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. x + 210 pp. Emory Elliott. Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. xi + 324 pp. Edward M. Griffin. Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705-1787. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. xiii + 248 pp. Myra Jehlen. American Incarnation: The Individual, The Nation, The Continent. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. xii + 253 pp. James T. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. xxv + 387 pp. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark. Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981. xii + 272 pp. Illus. Scholarship in the 1980s has been busy redefining American writings before Emerson. Knowing, from the work of an earlier generation of critics, that Colonial and Revolutionary writers were sophisticated, self-aware and serious, readers have tried to find the traditions, habits of thought and rhetoric that link the Puritans with the "Connecticut Wits, " or Franklin with Transcen- dentalism, or the Mathers with Jefferson and the Federalist Papers. The eight books currently under review attempt various aspects of this task; a common theme is the movement from an intellectual duality to an intergration—to the Emersonian "affirmation of unity

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• The Puritan Conversion Narrative

  David Leverenz, Patricia Caldwell•The William and Mary Quarterly•1985

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