scholarly journals The Saving Grace of America’s Green Jeremiad

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 172
Author(s):  
John Gatta
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Creative Nonfiction ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
Barbara Kingsolver ◽  
Global Mission ◽  
Hebrew Prophets

By the late seventeenth century, Puritan leaders in colonial America were bemoaning what they perceived to be the betrayal of New England’s godly “errand into the wilderness.” In election sermons they mourned the community’s backsliding from its global mission as a “city upon a hill.” Such doomsday rhetoric echoed the lamentations of decline intoned by ancient Hebrew prophets such as Jeremiah. Yet this “Jeremiad” discourse characteristically reached beyond effusions of doom and gloom toward prospects of renewal through a conversion of heart. It blended warnings of impending catastrophe with hope for recovery if the erring souls it addressed chose to repent. This twofold identity of the Puritan Jeremiad, gradually refashioned into the American Jeremiad, has long resonated within and beyond this nation’s literary culture. Featured in creative nonfiction, jeremiad expression surfaces in various forms. And with rise of the modern environmental movement, a prophetic subspecies identifiable as “Green Jeremiad” has lately emerged. The essay reflects on how, especially in an Anthropocene era, Green Jeremiads dramatize the crisis of spirit and faith that undergird challenges to earth’s geophysical health and survival. What saving graces might temper the chilling reminders of imminent peril composed by authors such as Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben, Barbara Kingsolver, and Elizabeth Kolbert?

scholarly journals The Jesuitesses in the Bookshop: Catholic Lay Sisters’ Participation in the Dutch Book Trade, 1650–1750

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 163-184
Author(s):  
Elise Watson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Dutch Book ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Institutional Critique ◽  
Public Criticism

The institutional Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam relied on the work of inspired women who lived under an informal religious rule and called themselves ‘spiritual daughters’. Once the States of Holland banned all public exercise of Catholicism, spiritual daughters leveraged the ambiguity of their religious status to pursue unique roles in their communities as catechists, booksellers and enthusiastic consumers of print. However, their lack of a formal order caused consternation among their Catholic confessors. It also disturbed Reformed authorities in their communities, who branded them ‘Jesuitesses’. Whilst many scholars have documented this tension between inspired daughter and institutional critique, it has yet to be contextualized fully within the literary culture of the Dutch Republic. This article suggests that due to the de-institutionalized status of the spiritual daughters and the discursive print culture that surrounded them, public criticism replaced direct censure by Catholic and Reformed authorities as the primary impediment to their inspired work.

Verse Miscellanies in the Eighteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carly Watson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
The Status ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Distinct Kind

The eighteenth century was an age of miscellanies; thousands of miscellaneous collections containing verse appeared in print over the course of the century. This article considers miscellanies as a distinct kind of verse collection; whereas anthologies promote authorship as a category of literary definition, miscellanies invite readers to sample a variety of poetic forms and genres and often include poems without authorial attribution. The eighteenth-century tradition of miscellanies devoted exclusively to poetry has its roots in the late seventeenth century, and many aspects of seventeenth-century miscellany culture persisted well into the next century. This article looks at a number of ways in which verse miscellanies offer fresh perspectives on eighteenth-century literary culture. The popularity and reception of particular poems and poets, the formation of the English literary canon, and the status of authorship are all areas in which miscellanies make a significant contribution to critical understanding.

Colonial America

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Clark
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Early Settlement ◽  
Different Origins

The British American colonies embodied such social, economic, and political diversity that they did not, of course, constitute a single “old order” any more than Europe did. They had evolved from different origins: English, Dutch, and Scandinavian; and under an array of influences: Native American, French, African, Irish, Scottish, German. Even the two oldest areas of English settlement, the Chesapeake region and New England, differed markedly. In New England, where early settlement involved whole families, and where sex ratios quickly achieved a rough parity, seventeenth-century settlers set patterns for longevity and demographic robustness that were sustained throughout the colonial period.

scholarly journals Writing Self, Writing Empire

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Aria Fani
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Literary Environment

The seventeenth century marks an exciting period in the life of Persian literarycultures in northern India. Established as a language of administration byTurco-Afghans in the early thirteenth century, several centuries later Persianhad extended well beyond its initial administrative strongholds to become animportant medium for literary and religious composition, historiography, andtranslation. In a literary environment that prized both literary aesthetics andfierce rivalries, the massive textual production on vastly diverse subjects, aswell as the presence of literary salons, standalone bookstalls, and mushā‘irahs(poetic assemblies), cumulatively point to a lively Persian literary culture thatechoed across political, religious, and socio-cultural terrains.Unfortunately, most of the scholarship on Persian in the medieval Indiancontext over the past decades has failed to illuminate this dynamic scene.Moreover, most studies seek to highlight Persian’s influence on India or examineIndia’s civilizational impact on Persian. Both paradigms assume a natural(read: Iranian) ecumene for Persian and thus do not critically considerthe slippage between linguistic, ethnic, and geographic designations wh

The Arse Poetica of Thomas Hobbes: On the Composition and Reception of De Mirabilibus Pecci

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-357
Author(s):  
Jessica Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Geological Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Mock Epic

This article provides a two-part study of Thomas Hobbes’ De Mirabilibus Pecci, a Latin poem composed very early in his career. Part one examines the poem as a product of Hobbes’ participation in the recreational literary culture of Caroline England, in particular analysing the influence of mock-epic and burlesque traditions that would continue to shape Hobbes’ writings but also studying how the poem offers compelling evidence for his early preoccupation with the laws of motion, with geological processes such as the creation and erosion of stone formations, and with the philosophy of Lucretius. Part two recounts the extraordinary history of the poem’s reception in the last decades of the seventeenth century. The poem’s familiarity among Hobbes’ allies and adversaries alike helped to cement his reputation as a master of scoffing and drollery, as an opponent of the experimental science practiced by the Royal Society, and as a freethinker or atheist.

Structure, date and sources of Hikayat Aceh revisited: The problem of Mughal-Malay literary ties

2008 ◽  
Vol 162 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Braginsky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Coromandel Coast

It is common knowledge that from the early centuries AD to the nineteenth century India remained an important source of inspiration for creators of traditional Malay culture and Malay men of letters. However, if literary ties between Hindu India and the Malay world, both direct and mediated by Javanese literature, have frequently drawn the attention of researchers, creative stimuli that came to the Malays from Muslim India remain inadequately studied. Yet the role of these stimuli, radiating from major centres of the Muslim, Persianate, India such as Bengal, Gujarat, Deccan, and the Coromandel coast, in the development of Malay literary culture was by no means inferior to the inspiration originating from Hindu India. In this context, cultural and literary contacts of the Sultanate of Aceh with the Mughal Empire in the seventeenth century are a particularly interesting and challenging subject.

The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England.

1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Paula R. Backscheider ◽  
N. H. Keeble
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture
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