Word: magnalia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LITERARY KEY to late Puritan ideology, Bercovitch chooses not the jeremiads but Cotton Mather's epic work, the Magnalia Christi Americana--particularly his "Life of John Winthrop." In his "Life," Mather portrays Winthrop as a "Nehemius Americanus," a peculiarly American saviour whose life foreshadows the Second Coming. Mather's ambition, according to Bercovitch, is to be the Winthrop of his generation; writing during the decline of theocracy, Mather, he says, offered himself--in his capacity as a representative American type--as a link between the triumphal era of Winthrop and the millenial future, thus initiating a special mode of defining...
...paperback age, the books themselves, passing through Lowdermilk's from one owner to another, acquired histories and characters of their own. Roaming among the shop's six miles of shelves, the browser might have come upon a 1702 edition of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, a signed first edition of John Brown's Body or a mint copy of Agricola's De Re Metallica signed by the translators, Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hoover. In the musty chaos of books-memoirs, Shakespeare, Chinese history, the Arctic, the Civil War, Egypt-a visitor to Lowdermilk...
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