For generations, scholars have imagined American puritans as religious enthusiasts, fleeing persecution, finding refuge in Massachusetts, and founding 'America'. The puritans have been read as a product of New England and the origin of American exceptionalism. This History challenges the usual understanding of American puritans, offering new ways of reading their history and their literary culture. Together, an international team of authors make clear that puritan America cannot be thought of apart from Native America, and that its literature is also grounded in Britain, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and networks that spanned the globe. Each chapter focuses on a single place, method, idea, or context to read familiar texts anew and to introduce forgotten or neglected voices and writings. A History of American Puritan Literature is a collaborative effort to create not a singular literary history, but a series of interlocked new histories of American puritan literature.

‘Teachers of early American literature will likely find their own approaches to Puritan literature benefit from the straightforward, substantial, and lucid essays … Highly recommended.’

G. D. MacDonald Source: Choice

'… a new paradigm for understanding and organizing a range of textual and nontextual media largely produced in settler colonial New England.'

Teresa Toulouse Source: Early American Literature

‘In a series of masterful, erudite, and original essays, the volume dismantles the seemingly intractable connection many are still inclined to make between the puritans, the birth of the nation, and policy decisions driven by racial, ethnic, and religious animosity. … Each essay offers new angles for scholarship even as it manages to speak to a more general audience of students. By uncovering new voices in the archive and recontextualizing old ones among the diverse others who peopled the puritans’ world, A History of American Puritan Literature invaluably reassesses the puritan past without losing sight of the uses to which that past has been put in a series of US presents.’

Nan Goodman Source: American Literary History