The Puritan Ordeal [Paperback]

More than an ecclesiastical or political history, this book is a vivid description of the earliest American immigrant experience. It depicts the dramatic tale of the seventeenth-century newcomers to our shores as they were drawn and pushed to make their way in an unsettled and unsettling world.A powerfully imaginative and personal bookperhaps as all great American books on the Puritans must be.The arguments in this book will resonate in the study of American culture for years to come&There is much to recommend this book & historians and literary critics alike will be challenged by [it].The Puritan Ordealshows great promise for the continuing study of the life of the mind in America.Delbancos singular achievement inThe Puritan Ordealremains his sensitive, attentive, and generous recovery of the first emigrants voices&[This book] may well provide the richest transcription we have of the hesitant, bewildered yet ultimately hopeful new-world inflections that register everywhere in early American culture.The author of this study, displaying an ideal combination of sensibility and judgement, discusses the Puritans who fled to New England and traces the effect of their immigrant experience on American literature. Like later immigrants, they found that emotional rifts opened between the first and second generations, and, like other English religious radicals, they were disturbed by womens demands for religious equality. The Puritan hope of creating a Christiannonexploitativeeconomy in the New World was disappointed, and the dominant strand in Puritan thought became the need to constrain sinful human beings. However, Mr. Delbanco believes that it was the other strand in Puritan thoughtthe aspiration toward a community of saintswhich became an important influence on American literature.Against those historians whose primary interest has been the life of the mind or the development of theecclesia, Delbanco emphasizes the fact that the Puritans werel#X