TY - BOOK ID - 2727519 TI - Authorizing experience : refigurations of the body politic in seventeenth-century New England writing PY - 1999 SN - 1282753681 9786612753688 1400823021 1400811449 0691059497 9781400811441 9780691059495 1400801834 1400801826 PB - Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, DB - UniCat KW - American literature KW - Rhetoric KW - Politics and literature KW - Literature and society KW - Authority in literature KW - Colonies in literature KW - American Literature KW - English KW - Languages & Literatures KW - History and criticism KW - Political aspects KW - History KW - Autorité dans la littérature KW - Colonies dans la littérature KW - Gezag in de literatuur KW - Koloniale literatuur KW - Kolonies in de literatuur KW - Littérature coloniale KW - Littérature postcoloniale KW - Postkoloniale literatuur KW - Authority in literature. KW - Colonies in literature. KW - History and criticism. KW - New England KW - Intellectual life KW - Literature KW - Literature and sociology KW - Society and literature KW - Sociology and literature KW - Literature and politics KW - Language and languages KW - Speaking KW - Social aspects KW - Sociolinguistics KW - Authorship KW - Expression KW - Literary style KW - Northeastern States KW - Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 KW - 17th century KW - American literature - Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 - History and criticism. KW - Rhetoric - Political aspects - New England - History - 17th century. KW - Politics and literature - New England - History - 17th century. KW - Literature and society - New England - History - 17th century. KW - New England - Intellectual life - 17th century. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:2727519 AB - The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation of a unique culture. Here Jim Egan offers an unprecedented look at how early modern American writers helped make this notion of experience so powerful that we now take it as a given rather than as the product of hard-fought rhetorical battles waged over ways of imagining one's relationship to a larger social community. In order to show how our modern notion of experience emerges from a historical change that experience itself could not have brought about, he turns to works by seventeenth-century writers in New England and reveals the ways in which they authorized experience, ultimately producing a rhetoric distinctive to the colonies and supportive of colonialism. Writers such as John Smith, William Wood, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Tompson, and William Hubbard were sensitive to the challenge experiential authority posed to established social hierarchies. Egan argues that they used experience to authorize a supplementary status system that would at once enhance England's economic, political, and spiritual status and provide a new basis for regulating English and native populations. These writers were assuaging fears over how exposure to alien environments threatened actual English bodies and also the imaginary body that authorized English monarchy and allowed English subjects to think of themselves as a nation. By reimagining the English nation, these supporters of English colonialism helped create a modern way of imagining national identity and individual subject formation. ER -