Doctrine and Difference
Subtitle: Essays in the Literature of New England
Publisher: Routledge
Published: December 10, 1996
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780415912389
First sentence: ONCE, LONGER ago than one cares to remember, it seemed quite necessary to insist that Edward Taylor's most localized allegory-of the Soul's salvation in latter-day New England-is possessed by a single-minded interest in the question of presumption and despair.
Description: Doctrine and Difference shows how the spirit and forms of liberalism are a necessary but by no means sufficient explanation for the flowering of literature in this period. The colonialist writers, in Colacurcio's view, attempted to have things their own provincial way amidst an air of rejection by the cosmopolitan literary establishment.

Capturing the violence of repression, the energy required to meet its moral argument head on, and the disease of embattled survival, Doctrine and Difference shows how these works are in many ways the literary remnants of Puritanism.