Authorizing experience

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.

subjects: American literature,  Authority in literature,  Colonies in literature,  History,  History and criticism,  Intellectual life,  Literature and society,  Political aspects,  Political aspects of Rhetoric,  Politics and literature,  Rhetoric,  Koloniën,  Histoire,  Autorité dans la littérature,  Colonies dans la littérature,  Littérature et société,  Politiek,  Histoire et critique,  Bellettrie,  Littérature américaine,  General,  Amerikaans,  Vie intellectuelle,  American,  Discours politique,  Colonial period,  Politique et littérature,  LITERARY CRITICISM,  Gezag,  American literature, history and criticism, colonial period, ca. 1600-1775,  New england, intellectual life

Places: New England

Times: 17th century,  Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775