{"product_id":"culture-and-language-at-crossed-purposes-the-unsettled-records-of-american-settlement-9780226818467","title":"Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eCulture and Language at Crossed Purposes\u003c\/i\u003e unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties--\"a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.\" A noted scholar of the \"textual conditions\" of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the \u003ci\u003eArbella \u003c\/i\u003esermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather's \u003ci\u003eMagnalia\u003c\/i\u003e, Benjamin Franklin's celebrated treaty folios and \u003ci\u003eAutobiography\u003c\/i\u003e, and Thomas Jefferson's \u003ci\u003eNotes on the State of Virginia\u003c\/i\u003e. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works--the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann's book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory--the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJerome McGann\u003c\/b\u003e is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia and visiting research professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a director of the online editorial project \"Jaime de Angulo's \u003ci\u003eOld Time \u003c\/i\u003eStories: Voice, Text, Image.\"\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50525738107154,"sku":"9780226818467","price":31.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_132f784d-2dfa-462d-95de-bbe6c7007fd8.jpg?v=1731235700","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/culture-and-language-at-crossed-purposes-the-unsettled-records-of-american-settlement-9780226818467","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}