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From Cultural Memory to Living Word: On Mather's Magnalia
- New Literary History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 50, Number 2, Spring 2019
- pp. 171-195
- 10.1353/nlh.2019.0011
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Keying off Reiner Smolinski's study of the Magnalia and three other early New England histories, McGann argues for a more rigorously philological approach to Mather's magnum opus. Though it represents itself, as Sacvan Berkovitch showed, as a testament to "the redemptive meaning of America", a close inquiry into the Magnalia's documentary condition argues that the importance and "greatness" of the work lies in its dynamic incoherencies. The history of the Magnalia's composition supplies a map of the work's tormented rage for redemptive order.