William Bradford's Books: Of Plimmoth Plantation and the Printed Word

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JHU Press, 2003 M01 8 - 280 pages

Widely regarded as the most important narrative of seventeenth-century New England, William Bradford's Of Plimmoth Plantation is one of the founding
documents of American literature and history. In William Bradford's Books this portrait of the religious dissenters who emigrated from the Netherlands to New England in 1620 receives perhaps its sharpest textual analysis to date—and the first since that of Samuel Eliot Morison two generations ago. Far from the gloomy elegy that many readers find, Bradford's history, argues Douglas Anderson, demonstrates remarkable ambition and subtle grace, as it contemplates the adaptive success of a small community of religious exiles. Anderson offers fresh literary and historical accounts of Bradford's accomplishment, exploring the context and the form in which the author intended his book to be read.

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Contents

ONE Words and Wind
25
THREE Artificial Persons
113
FOUR Here Is the Miserablest Time
158
The High Preserver of Men
241
Notes
253
Index
275
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Douglas Anderson is the Sterling Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature and The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin, the latter available from Johns Hopkins.

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