Authorizing experience
Subtitle: refigurations of the body politic in seventeenth-century New England writing
By: Jim Egan.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 182
Subjects: American literature -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- History and criticism.; Rhetoric -- Political aspects -- New England -- History -- 17th century.; Politics and literature -- New England -- History -- 17th century.; Literature and society -- New England -- History -- 17th century.; American literature -- New England -- History and criticism.; Authority in literature.; Colonies in literature.; New England -- Intellectual life -- 17th century.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [161]-178) and index.