The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Volume 21)

by Nancy Armstrong, Leonard Tennenhouse

Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse challenge traditional accounts of the origins of modern Anglo-American culture by focusing on the emergence of print culture in England and the North American colonies. They postulate a modern middle class that consisted of authors and intellectuals who literally wrote a new culture into being.

Milton's Paradise Lost marks the emergence of this new literacy. The authors show how Milton helped transform English culture into one of self-enclosed families made up of self-enclosed individuals. However, the authors point out that the popularity of Paradise Lost was matched by that of the Indian captivity narratives that flowed into England from the American colonies. Mary Rowlandson's account of her forcible separation from the culture of her origins stresses the ordinary person's ability to regain those lost origins, provided she remains truly English. In a colonial version of the Miltonic paradigm, Rowlandson sought to return to a family of individuals much like the one in Milton's depiction of the fallen world.

Thus the origin both of modern English culture and of the English novel are located in North America. American captivity narratives formulated the ideal of personal life that would be reproduced in the communities depicted by Defoe, Richardson, and later domestic fiction.

275 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Nancy Armstrong is a scholar, critic and professor of English at Duke University.

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Armstrong and Tennenhouse want to resituate the origins of the English novel in the American captivity narrative while troubling the very idea of origins, examining the birth of the author, and by linking the political development of the modern nation state with the personal development of female interiority demonstrated through writing. You will read about John Locke, Derrida, Foucault, Milton, Daniel Defoe, Mary Rowaldson, and Pamela at length.