Puritanism in North American Literature Adrián Leco 12th Grade

Puritanism was a religious reform movement in the late 16th and 17th centuries that tried to purify the Church of England of remnants of the Roman Catholic popery. Puritans were central to American writing, history and even culture. They brought to the new world the idea of the American Dream conquering a New World and having new opportunities. Moreover, the Puritan imagination was central to the nature of American writing. One reason for this was that it brought to the New World not only “The American Dream”, but a vision of the task and nature of writing itself. Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford, City Upon a Hill by John Winthrop, and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Rowlandson by Mary Rowlandson were important works plenty of puritan elements.

The origins of Puritanism were in the Protestant Reformation and Calvinism since Puritans were radical Calvinists. They saw the world as wilderness in which there were evil things because the world was full of temptations. In addition, they believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible because they were influenced by this book and they considered it as a central hermeneutical tool. They did not believe in...