This seminar will take as its nominal theme Puritanism, but we will be concerned with dimensions of Puritan thought which directly shaped subsequent conceptions of literature, ethics, politics, and religion. The course will be comparative, both in drawing upon English, American, and European source materials, and upon later works that draw substantively from the complex inheritance of the Puritanism.

Texts:

• The King James Bible.
• Milton, John. Paradise Lost.
• Bradford, William. Historie of Plimouth Plantation.
• Mather, Cotton. Wonders of the Invisible World.
• Edwards, Jonathan. The Nature of True Virtue.
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables.
• Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain.
• Miller, Arthur. The Crucible.