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9781469671772 Academic Inspection Copy

Unmoored

The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America
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New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty. But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates, if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her "city on a hill" with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England.
Ana Schwartz is assistant professor of English at University of Texas at Austin
Building on extensive literary theory, Ana Schwartz explores the actions, words, and especially the silence of social dissenters in the seventeenth-century 'frontier' world, infused with guilt for possessing a land that was not their own."--Journal of American History Unmoored allows us to witness repression's skill. Closely examining this sophisticated process, we might be able better to determine, perhaps mitigate, our own conscription onto a 'similarly unhappy stage' (33-34)."--William and Mary Quarterly
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