This work shows how the spirit and forms of liberalism are a necessary but by no means sufficient explanation for the flowering of literature in 19th-century New England. The enduring power of many antebellum American texts is seen as derived fron puritanism. The colonialist writers were attempting to have things their own provincial way amidst an air of rejection by the cosmopolitan literary establishment. Capturing the violence of repression, the energy required to meet its moral argument head on, and the disease of embattled survival, this volume shows how the works of writers such as Melville, Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson are in many ways the literary remnants of puritanism.