A01=Robert Blair St. George
architecture
Author_Robert Blair St. George
Category=JBCC
Category=JBGB
Category=NHK
cultural representation
eighteenth-century crowd violence
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Federalists
folklore
gravestones
labor politics
material culture
metaphor
metaphysical poetry
popular religion
sermons
seventeenth-century farmsteads
witchcraft narratives
Product details
- ISBN 9780807846889
- Weight: 719g
- Dimensions: 157 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 26 May 1998
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The people of colonial New England lived in a densely metaphoric landscape--a world where familiars invaded bodies without warning, witches passed with ease through locked doors, and houses blew down in gusts of angry, providential wind. Meaning, Robert St. George argues, was layered, often indirect, and inextricably intertwined with memory, apprehension, and imagination. By exploring the linkages between such cultural expressions as seventeenth-century farmsteads, witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd violence, and popular portraits of New England Federalists, St. George demonstrates that in early New England, things mattered as much as words in the shaping of metaphor. These forms of cultural representation--architecture and gravestones, metaphysical poetry and sermons, popular religion and labor politics--are connected through what St. George calls a 'poetics of implication.' Words, objects, and actions, referentially interdependent, demonstrate the continued resilience and power of seventeenth-century popular culture throughout the eighteenth century. Illuminating their interconnectedness, St. George calls into question the actual impact of the so-called Enlightenment, suggesting just how long a shadow the colonial climate of fear and inner instability cast over the warm glow of the early national period. |A social history of the Middle West, as it evolved from a patchwork of isolated immigrant cultures into a region of coalesced ethnic groups within a pluralist American society. (Please see cloth edition, published 3/97.)
Robert Blair St. George is associate professor of folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania.
