Word: puritanism
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America, the great receiver. From every culture to arrive within its borders, it embraces some new ingredient. Puritan wrath. Black cool. Irish poetics. Jewish irony. One after another, America draws them down the channels of its awareness and puts them into play in new settings. They collide and cross- pollinate and mix it up, nowhere more so than in the arts and popular culture. Sparks fly at the meeting points. The Jewish novel works variations on the keynotes of Puritan gloom. The western is reseen through John Ford's Irish eyes. Sinatra meets Duke Ellington. Every offering is admitted...
...surface the two writers, separated by time and culture, seem wholly unrelated. The American is a sensual naif; the Anglo-Irishman is a sophisticated puritan. Twain is happy for small favors; Shaw is ungrateful for major rewards. Presented with the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, Shaw informs the Royal Swedish Academy that their award is a "lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety." Shaw's dramas brim with advocates of free thought and liberal policy, but his correspondence reveals him as a fool of the new totalitarians. Adolf Hitler is a "wonderful preacher...
...American higher education. The ascension of this brash Western upstart has come as both a shock and a challenge to such Ivy League powerhouses as 352-year-old Harvard and 242-year-old Princeton, where the notion of academic endeavor is firmly associated with rigorous winters and a stern Puritan work ethic. Reflecting the early contempt heaped on Palo Alto by the Eastern establishment, one 19th century editorialist wrote that "Stanford's great wealth can only be used to erect an empty shell...
...John Updike reaches back 200 years to put himself in direct dialogue with another great realist. New England Puritan writer, Nathaniel Hawthrone. Though the pastoral New England village of The Scarlet Letter belongs to history, Updike explores the same questions which perplexed that less permissive landscape. The notions of tradition, morality, religion and womanhood that dominate Hawthrone's 18th century world are also Updike's concerns...
...hundred years after Hester Prynne struggled to be a woman in Puritan New England, Sarah Worth finds herself not much better...