Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T04:02:12.510Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

William Bradford's American Sublime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Laurence
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

William Bradford's tableau of the Pilgrims' landing at Cape Cod supplies a conventional point of departure for American literature. Yet, in the customary ordering of literary history, the passage is doubly anomalous. Written in 1630, it presents, at least one hundred years too soon, an example of what Kant later called the dynamical sublime; and it anticipates, some two hundred years too soon, episodes from the canon of nineteenth-century American literature that criticism describes as characteristically American. The essay considers the formal motives and rhetorical coercions behind this double anomaly to show how the sublime, as it emerges in Bradford, signals a withdrawal from empirical fact in a search for satisfactions of meaning that derive from literature. The level of aggression Bradford finds necessary to this withdrawal lends his writing a recognizably American bent. The passage shows us a scene of writing at once singular to Bradford and distinctly American.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 102 , Issue 1 , January 1987 , pp. 55 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation. Ed. Morison, Samuel Eliot. New York: Modern Library–Random, 1952.Google Scholar
Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.Google Scholar
Champlain, Samuel. Voyages of Samuel de Champlain. Trans. Otis, Charles Pomeroy. 3 vols. Boston: Prince Soc., 1880. Vols. 11–13 of Prince Society Publications. Rpt. New York: Franklin, 1966.Google Scholar
Charvat, William. “American Romanticism and the Depression of 1837.” The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat. Ed. Bruccoli, Matthew J. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968. 49–67.Google Scholar
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed. Seyersted, Per. 2 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969. 2: 879–1000.Google Scholar
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill, 1983.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” MLN 94 (1979): 919–30. Rpt. in The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. 68–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Johnson, Thomas H. 3 vols. Cambridge: Belknap–Harvard UP, 1955.Google Scholar
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Volume V, 1835–1838. Ed. Sealts, Merton M. Jr. Cambridge: Belknap–Harvard UP, 1965.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. 1923. Trans. Joan Riviere. Rev. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1962.Google Scholar
Grabo, Norman. “William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation.” Landmarks of American Writing. Ed. Cohen, Hennig. New York: Basic, 1969. 3–19.Google Scholar
Hartman, Geoffrey. Wordsworth's Poetry: 1787–1814. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964.Google Scholar
Howard, Alan B. “Art and History in Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 28 (1971): 237–66.Google Scholar
Jones, Howard Mumford. O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years. New York: Viking, 1964.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. 1790. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1928.Google Scholar
Kierkegaard, S⊘ren. Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology. 1843. Trans. Walter Lowrie. 1941. New York: Harper, 1964.Google Scholar
Laurence, David. “In Europe's Margin: William Bradford and the Wilderness Space of American Writing.” Unpublished essay, 1986.Google Scholar
“Longinus.” On the Sublime. Classical Literary Criticism. Trans. Dorsch, T. S. New York: Penguin, 1965. 99–158.Google Scholar
Moir, Randall, et al. A Summary and Analysis of Cultural Resource Information on the Continental Shelf from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Hatteras. 4 vols. Springfield: National Technical Information Service, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, 1979.Google Scholar
Smith, John. A Description of New England. London, 1616. Rpt. in vol. 2 of Tracts and Other Papers Relating to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776. Collected by Peter Force. 4 vols. Gloucester: Smith, 1963.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose. Ed. Morse, Samuel French. 1957. New York: Vintage-Random, 1982.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Stevens, Holly. New York: Knopf, 1971.Google Scholar
Stilgoe, John R. Common Landscape of America: 1580–1845. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Whicher, Stephen E. Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1953. New York: Continuum, 1961.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.Google Scholar
[Winslow, Edward, and William Bradford, J. A Relation … of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England [Mourt's Relation]. London, 1622. Norwood: Johnson; Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1974.Google Scholar
Wroth, Lawrence C. The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, 1524–1528. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970.Google Scholar
Young, Alexander. Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth, from 1602 to 1625. Boston: Little, 1844.Google Scholar