Writing in the New Nation (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Larzer Ziff
- First Published: 1991
- Type of Work: Cultural and literary history
- Time of Work: c. 1740-c. 1850
- Setting: The United States
- Principal Characters: Jonathan Edwards, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur, John Bartram, Charles Brockden Brown, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Timothy Dwight, Ethan Allen
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: Culture, United States or Americans, Revolutionaries, Literature, Religion, Conservatism, Puritans or Puritanism, Printing, Literacy, Botany or botanists
- Locales: United States
When Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur asked in the third chapter of Letters from an American Farmer (1782) “What Is an American,” he was posing a peculiarly American question. The novelty, fluidity, and heterogeneity of the United States has prompted a search for self-definition that began with William Bradford’s Of Plimmouth Plantation (pb. 1856) and John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) and that persists in Fourth of July addresses. Traditionally, critics have found two opposing answers to Crèvecoeur’s query, two conflicting streams of...
[The entire page is 1786 words long]
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