Conversing by signs
Subtitle: poetics of implication in colonial New England culture
By: Robert Blair St. George.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 466
Subjects: Material culture -- New England -- History -- 18th century; Material culture -- New England -- History -- 17th century; Landscape -- Social aspects -- New England -- History -- 18th century; Landscape -- Social aspects -- New England -- History -- 17th century; Architecture and society -- New England -- History -- 18th century; Architecture and society -- New England -- History -- 17th century; Poetics -- History -- 17th century; Poetics -- History -- 18th century; New England -- Civilization -- 18th century; New England -- Civilization -- 17th century
Description: The people of colonial New England lived in a densely metaphoric landscape - a world where familiars invaded bodies without warning, witches passed with ease through locked doors, and houses blew down in gusts of angry providential wind. Meaning, Robert St. George argues, was layered, often indirect and inextricably intertwined with memory, apprehension, and imagination.

By exploring the linkages between such cultural expressions as seventeenth-century farmsteads, witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd violence, and popular portraits of New England Federalists, St. George demonstrates that in early New England, things mattered as much as words in the shaping of metaphor.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 401-454) and index.