The Puritan-Provincial Vision

This book suggests a new interpretation of the characteristic qualities of Scottish and American literatures. Considering the self-consciously different stance which sets them apart from English literature, the author develops the constituents of the ‘puritan-provincial vision’: a particular way of looking at life and man’s relationship to what lies beyond himself. The book begins with the writings of Calvin and culminates in detailed comparisons of individual works of Scottish and American nineteenth-century prose, questioning the literary and human consequences of this vision through theological, philosophical, political and literary contexts. Among the major authors considered are Jonathan Edwards, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Emerson, Cooper, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Scott, James Hogg, John Galt and Thomas Carlyle. Evaluations of their work show the characteristic effects of subject, tone, stance and implication which differentiate puritan-provincial literature from its ‘central’ English counterpart. This puritan-provincial vision is not exclusive to Scottish and American literatures; the features discussed here will interest those concerned with other literatures written in English.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Calvinism and the puritan mind; 2. After Armageddon; Jonathan Edwards and David Hume; 3. From puritanism to provincialism; 4. The pursuit of the double; 5. Spectators, spies and spectacles: the observer’s stance; 6. ‘Is anything central?’