This eBook edition of ""Of Plymouth Plantation" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Of Plymouth Plantation was written over a period of years by William Bradford, the leader of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. It is regarded as the most authoritative account of the Pilgrims and the early years of the colony which they founded. The journal was written between 1630 and 1651 and describes the story of the Pilgrims from 1608, when they settled in the Dutch Republic on the European mainland through the 1620 Mayflower voyage to the New World, until the year 1647. The book ends with a list of Mayflower passengers and what happened to them which was written in 1651. The Bradford journal records the events of the first 30 years of Plymouth Colony, as well as the reactions of the colonists to those events, and it is regarded by historians as the preeminent work of 17th century America. It is Bradford's simple yet vivid account that has made the Pilgrims what Samuel Eliot Morison called the "spiritual ancestors of all Americans".

When the Europeans first arrived in America, they had a number of preconceptions, prejudices, expectations and hopes about what life in the New World would be like. This book examines the different visions and representations of America conveyed in the writings of Spanish conquistador Á?lvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and the Pilgrim leader William Bradford, taking both writers within their respective literary and historical contexts. Anthologies of American literature have consistently ignored Spanish-language achievements on the grounds of a restrictive interpretation of American literature based on linguistic boundaries. Consequently, Spanish-language texts such as Cabeza de Vaca's or the account by the Hidalgo de Elvas, to name but two examples, have been marginalized in the narrative of American literary history. In seeking to redress this neglect, Galisteo contributes to scholarship which seeks to analyze Early America as a whole, including not only Anglo American perspectives but also the Spanish American aspect of the colonization process.

Puritan American writers faced a dilemma: they had an obligation to use language as a celebration of divine artistry, but they could not allow their writing to become an iconic graven image of authorial self-idolatry. In this study William Scheick explores one way in which William Bradford, Nathaniel Ward, Anne Bradstreet, Urian Oakes, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards mediated these conflicting imperatives. They did so, he argues, by creating moments in their works when they and their audience could hesitate and contemplate the central paradox of language: its capacity to intimate both concealed authorial pride and latent deific design. These ambiguous occasions served Puritan writers as places where the threat of divine wrath and the promise of divine mercy intersected in unresolved tension. By the nineteenth century the heritage of this Christlike mingling of temporal connotation and eternal denotation had mutated. A peculiar late eighteenth-century narrative by Nathan Fiske and a short story by Edward Bellamy both suggest that the binary nature of language exploited by their Puritan ancestors was still a vital authorial concern; but neither of these writers affirms the presence of an eternal denotative signification hidden within the conflicting historical contexts of their apparently allegorical language. For them, appreciation of the mystery of a divine revelation possibly concealed in words yielded to puzzlement over language itself, specifically over the inadequacy of language to signify more than its own instability of design. This book is a tightly focused study of an important aspect of Puritan American writers' use of language by one of the leading scholars in the field of early American literature.

A companion to The Directory of rural development projects, Voices... encourages networking the exchange of significant means to sustainable development. The effective principles require accomodation to the subject country's culture, system of government, stage of economic growth and resource availability related to local needs. A study of the child figure in American fiction and of the language of children in literature, based on close readings of novels and short stories, from the classics of Hawthorne, James, and Cather to modern and contemporary works by Henry Roth, William Peter Blatty and Toni Morrison. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR