Abram Van Engen – författare

In 1650, the puritan poet Anne Bradstreet became the first person from British North America to publish a book of poems. The Tenth Muse made her famous, and for almost four centuries, Bradstreet has been canonized, anthologized, studied, and taught. She's remarkable in many ways--partly for her early forms of feminism; partly for her modes of spiritual devotion; partly for the power embedded in her elegies, her love lyrics, her meditations, and her autobiography. Yet while many praise her, others note her failures. She was both far-seeing and near-sighted, a foundational figure for American literature in ways both good and bad, still provoking readers three centuries after she died.Anne Bradstreet Now re-envisions Anne Bradstreet through the powerful writings of some of the most prominent poets in America today. This collection presents the voices of contemporary writers--writers who have won the biggest prizes possible in American letters--to reflect in poetry and prose on Bradstreet's influence, legacy, and lasting significance. In their own poems and essays, these writers direct our attention to diverse contexts in which Bradstreet's work must be understood and re-understood; to the innovations and implications of her writing; and to the ways her work continues to resonate, stun, frustrate, and inspire.

Revising dominant accounts of Puritanism and challenging the literary history of sentimentalism, Sympathetic Puritans argues that a Calvinist theology of sympathy shaped the politics, religion, rhetoric, and literature of early New England. Scholars have often understood and presented sentimentalism as a direct challenge to stern and stoic Puritan forebears: the standard history traces a cult of sensibility back to moral sense philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, not Puritan New England. In contrast, Van Engen's work unearths the pervasive presence of sympathy in a large archive of Puritan sermons, treatises, tracts, poems, journals, histories, and captivity narratives. Sympathetic Puritans also demonstrates how two types of sympathy -- the active command to fellow-feel (a duty), as well as the passive sign that could indicate salvation (a discovery) -- pervaded Puritan society and came to define the very boundaries of English culture, affecting conceptions of community, relations with Native Americans, and the development of American literature. By analyzing Puritan theology, preaching, prose, and poetry, Van Engen re-examines the Antinomian Controversy, conversion narratives, transatlantic relations, Puritan missions, Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative -- and Puritan culture more generally -- through the lens of sympathy. Demonstrating and explicating a Calvinist theology of sympathy in seventeenth-century New England, the book reveals the religious history of a concept that has largely been associated with more secular roots.