Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture

St. George, Robert Blair

ISBN 10: 0807846880 / ISBN 13: 9780807846889

Editore: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998

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[Interesting provenance: From the private library of renowned historian, Philip D. Morgan.] Softcover. Good binding and cover. Minor shelf wear. Owner's name on front end page, else unmarked. From the professional library of Dr. Philip D. Morgan, a professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Morgan specializes in the African-American experience, the history of slavery, the early Caribbean, and the study of the early Atlantic world. Morgan is the author of more than 14 books on Colonial America and African American history. He has won both the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for his book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998).

Codice articolo 2208010100

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture
• Editore: The University of North Carolina Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 1998
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0807846880
• ISBN 13: 9780807846889
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Condizione: As New
• Peso: 28 once
• Cataloghi dei venditori:
  • Literature and Criticism

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

The people of colonial New England lived in a densely metaphoric landscape--a world where familiars invaded bodies without warning, witches passed with ease through locked doors, and houses blew down in gusts of angry, providential wind. Meaning, Robert St. George argues, was layered, often indirect, and inextricably intertwined with memory, apprehension, and imagination. By exploring the linkages between such cultural expressions as seventeenth-century farmsteads, witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd violence, and popular portraits of New England Federalists, St. George demonstrates that in early New England, things mattered as much as words in the shaping of metaphor. These forms of cultural representation--architecture and gravestones, metaphysical poetry and sermons, popular religion and labor politics--are connected through what St. George calls a 'poetics of implication.' Words, objects, and actions, referentially interdependent, demonstrate the continued resilience and power of seventeenth-century popular culture throughout the eighteenth century. Illuminating their interconnectedness, St. George calls into question the actual impact of the so-called Enlightenment, suggesting just how long a shadow the colonial climate of fear and inner instability cast over the warm glow of the early national period.

Informazioni sull?autore

Robert Blair St. George is associate professor of folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania.