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Conversing by Signs : Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture by Robert Blair St George; NetLibrary, Inc is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Conversing by Signs : Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture about?

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

Author

Robert Blair St George; NetLibrary, Inc

Publisher

The University of North Carolina Press

Published

1998

Language

EN

ISBN

9780807864715

Subjects

History, Fiction, Humanities