Part I. Four Overviews: 1. Theoretical premises; 2. A narrative overview of New England’s literary development; 3. Marketplace, ethos, practice: the Antebellum literary situation; 4. Neoclassical continuities: the early national era and the New England literary tradition; Part II. Three Representative Genres: 5. New England Poetics: Emerson, Dickinson, and others; 6.

New England oratory from Everett to Emerson; 7. Literary scripturism; Part III. Reinventing Puritanism: the New England Historical Imagination: 8. The concept of puritan ancestry; 9. The politics of historiography; 10. Fictionalizing puritan history: some problems and approaches; 11. Hawthorne and Stowe as rival interpreters of New England Puritanism; Part IV. New England as a Country of the Imagination: The Spirit of Place: 12.

The cultural landscape in regional poetry and prose; 13. The village as icon; 14. Lococentrism from Dwight to Thoreau; 15. Comic grotesque; 16. Provincial Gothic: Hawthorne, Stoddard, and others; Postscript; Appendix. Vital statistics: a quantitative analysis of authorship as a profession in New England.