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his book, iies in his assimilation of colonial New England writing to
the main tradition of classic American writing. While the details of his
argument might provoke controversy, and while he may, as I think he
does, overstate the case for the persistence of the New England
influence throughout American culture, there is no question that his
elucidation of a significant literary imagination in Puritan writing is a
remarkable feat, undertaken with great skill, subtlety, and insight.
Toward the implicit design of Nehemias Americanus, Bercovitch
has two intentions:
to
show how Mather arrived at such an imaginative
feat of compression and coherence, and then , by asking "What is
American
about the rhetorical and conceptual des ign of 'Nehemias
Americanus'?" to show not only that the
Magnalia
"embodies a vision
that remains one of the most powerful unifying elements of the
culture," but also that "amazingly, the future proved them (Mather and
the Puritans) right" in their invention of "the redemptive meaning of
America." The book, then, argues along several fronts . It hoists Mather
and the Puritans to the front rank of American imaginative writers, as
the inventors of "a distinctive symbolic mode" ; it hoists writing itself
to a foremost position as a determining historical force; it lays claim to
a Puritan basis for American romantic writing, which is as much as to
say all subsequent writing of any significance; and it claims that the
inner substance, the essential content of all significant American
writing is (virtually by definition) America itself-that is, America as
·an idea of selfhood, or the writer himself as America.
The claims are as stunning as they are extravagant. Bercovitch has
grasped a certain element of Puritan thinking and writing that seems
to
have eluded earlier commentators, especially Perry Miller, whose
magisterial works on "The Puritan Mind" the present book takes as its
hidden antagonist. He has discovered that the founders of Massachu–
setts Bay Colony were compelled by their need to justify their peculiar
enterprise of taking the Reformation overseas to modify the terms and
modes of Reformation rhetoric. The necessity derived from the fact that
for the first time in the history of the Reformation, a place of settlement
could be plausibly imagined as an authentic-not merely
metaphoric-Promised Land. This uniqueness of the New England
venture-the effort to plant a genuine theocracy, a "city upon a hill"
that would carry forward and fulfill the work of redemption–
generated tensions within the inherited modes of exegesis, particularly
those concerning the meanings of self, history, and nation. The
inherited modes were methods of transformation, of reading out the
meanings of one text (the Old Testament) by reference to another (the
