Cristobal Silva
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199743476
- eISBN:
- 9780199896868
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199743476.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century, Cultural History
This book reimagines New England’s literary history by tracing seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century epidemics alongside the era of early colonial expansion, the Antinomian controversy, the ...
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This book reimagines New England’s literary history by tracing seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century epidemics alongside the era of early colonial expansion, the Antinomian controversy, the evolution of the halfway covenant and jeremiad, and Boston’s 1721 inoculation controversy. Moving beyond familiar histories of New World epidemics (often referred to as the “virgin soil” model), the book identifies epidemiology as a generic category with specialized forms and conventions, and considers how regional and generational patterns of illness reposition our understanding of the relation between immunology and ideology in the formation of communal identity. Epidemiology functions as subject and method of analysis in the book: it describes those narratives that represent modes of infection, population distribution, and immunity, but, more germane to the field of literary criticism, it also describes a set of analytical practices for theorizing the translation of epidemic events into narrative and generic terms. Without denying epidemiology’s usefulness in combating contemporary epidemics, the book affirms its power to transform colonial spaces, and thus to reshape inquiries into the nature of community and identity; it offers critics new trajectories for analyzing late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century epidemiology, and for rethinking illness and infection in terms of the geopolitics of medicine.Less
This book reimagines New England’s literary history by tracing seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century epidemics alongside the era of early colonial expansion, the Antinomian controversy, the evolution of the halfway covenant and jeremiad, and Boston’s 1721 inoculation controversy. Moving beyond familiar histories of New World epidemics (often referred to as the “virgin soil” model), the book identifies epidemiology as a generic category with specialized forms and conventions, and considers how regional and generational patterns of illness reposition our understanding of the relation between immunology and ideology in the formation of communal identity. Epidemiology functions as subject and method of analysis in the book: it describes those narratives that represent modes of infection, population distribution, and immunity, but, more germane to the field of literary criticism, it also describes a set of analytical practices for theorizing the translation of epidemic events into narrative and generic terms. Without denying epidemiology’s usefulness in combating contemporary epidemics, the book affirms its power to transform colonial spaces, and thus to reshape inquiries into the nature of community and identity; it offers critics new trajectories for analyzing late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century epidemiology, and for rethinking illness and infection in terms of the geopolitics of medicine.
Sterling Stuckey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199931675
- eISBN:
- 9780199356027
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199931675.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century, Cultural History
This book traces the roots of black nationalist thought and culture in America over several centuries. Arguing that African influences were pervasive among slaves and have profoundly influenced ...
More
This book traces the roots of black nationalist thought and culture in America over several centuries. Arguing that African influences were pervasive among slaves and have profoundly influenced African American and American life over the past 150 years, it considers the central question of how a single culture was formed out of a multiplicity of African ethnic groups in slavery. The book argues that the common culture fashioned by slaves gave rise to a Pan-Africanism that gave slaves identity and ideology that were related to the creative process itself, which made unity ever more likely. This was especially true of the blues, first heard by Frederick Douglass in the 1820s and written about in 1845 in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, another way in which the book establishes that the roots of black nationalism began as cultural and aesthetic forms rather than as social and political conditions. Disciplines such as anthropology, art history, folklore, and linguistics demonstrate that cultural practices that were widespread in slave communities had African antecedents. Slave Culture looks at how W.E.B. Du Bois, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Paul Robeson, and Douglass played roles in putting together nationalist theory. Nationalism found here was fashioned by those not mainly concerned with racial identity but with racial justice, and no one treated in this volume preferred racial separatism and the primacy of color over racial equality.Less
This book traces the roots of black nationalist thought and culture in America over several centuries. Arguing that African influences were pervasive among slaves and have profoundly influenced African American and American life over the past 150 years, it considers the central question of how a single culture was formed out of a multiplicity of African ethnic groups in slavery. The book argues that the common culture fashioned by slaves gave rise to a Pan-Africanism that gave slaves identity and ideology that were related to the creative process itself, which made unity ever more likely. This was especially true of the blues, first heard by Frederick Douglass in the 1820s and written about in 1845 in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, another way in which the book establishes that the roots of black nationalism began as cultural and aesthetic forms rather than as social and political conditions. Disciplines such as anthropology, art history, folklore, and linguistics demonstrate that cultural practices that were widespread in slave communities had African antecedents. Slave Culture looks at how W.E.B. Du Bois, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Paul Robeson, and Douglass played roles in putting together nationalist theory. Nationalism found here was fashioned by those not mainly concerned with racial identity but with racial justice, and no one treated in this volume preferred racial separatism and the primacy of color over racial equality.
Abigail and John Adams
American Creed
Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement
Building a New Jerusalem
A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith
Discovering Florida
The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover
Final Passages
The First Wall Street
