Morton, Thomas | Daniel B. Shea (essay date 1988)
Daniel B. Shea (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: Shea, Daniel B. “‘Our Professed Old Adversary’: Thomas Morton and the Naming of New England.” Early American Literature 23, No. 1 (Spring 1988): 52-69.
[In the following essay, Shea argues that Morton's failure to be taken seriously as a writer of literature is another effect of the triumph of Puritan ideology and the discourse of Puritanism, which silenced other voices that sought to shape the American consciousness.]
No less than love and war, literary history has its winners and losers. The triumphant ideology in colonial America was Puritan, and the discourse of Puritanism, as Sacvan Bercovitch has very fully demonstrated,1 not only dominated its own time but continued to supply the national lexicon long after the power of Puritanism had waned. It follows that the triumphant text is much studied among us and that the historical hegemony of Puritanism would become in our time...
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