The Pilgrim and the Bee - Matthew P. Brown

The Pilgrim and the Bee

Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England
Buch | Hardcover
288 Seiten
2007
University of Pennsylvania Press (Verlag)
978-0-8122-4015-3 (ISBN)
83,55 inkl. MwSt
"The Pilgrim and the Bee makes a broad claim about a reading-centered history, reclaiming for this purpose a distinctive body of texts. Brown's analysis marks an important step toward a better history of reading."-David D. Hall, Harvard University
We conventionally understand the book as a vessel for words, a place where the reader goes to have a private experience with written language. But readers' relationships with books are much more complex. In The Pilgrim and the Bee, Matthew P. Brown examines book culture and the rituals of reading in early New England, ranging across almanacs, commonplace books, wonder tales, funeral elegies, sermon notes, conversion relations, and missionary tracts. What emerges is a new understanding of the book at once as a material good, existing within the economies of buying, selling, giving, and receiving; as an object of reverence and a medium for the performance of reading; and as an organizational system for word, sound, and image.

The product of extensive archival research, The Pilgrim and the Bee brings together the disciplines of book studies and performance theory to reconsider the literary history of early America. Brown focuses on the reader's body, carefully studying reading practices during the first three generations of English settlement, with particular emphasis on the way such practices operated in the social rituals of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Understanding Puritanism as a style of piety predicated on access to texts, he describes a canon of texts (devotional "steady sellers") that, with the Bible, served as conduct literature for pious readers. These devotional manuals were reprinted and read frequently and helped to shape the social identities of gender, race, class, faith, and age. To Brown, seventeenth-century devotional readers are both pilgrims, treating texts as continuous narratives of redemptive journeying, and bees, treating texts as flowers or hives, as spatial objects where information is extracted and deposited discontinuously.

Matthew P. Brown teaches English and is Director of the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa.

Preface: A Phenomenology of the Book

Introduction: Toward a Reader-Based Literary History

Chapter 1. The Presence of the Text

Chapter 2. Devotional Steady Sellers and the Conduct of Reading

Chapter 3. Ritual Fasting

Chapter 4. Ritual Mourning

Chapter 5. Race, Literacy, and the Eliot Mission

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Erscheint lt. Verlag 9.7.2007
Reihe/Serie Material Texts
Zusatzinfo 2 illus.
Verlagsort Pennsylvania
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Geschichte Teilgebiete der Geschichte Kulturgeschichte
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaft
Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10 0-8122-4015-4 / 0812240154
ISBN-13 978-0-8122-4015-3 / 9780812240153
Zustand Neuware
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