This book starts from the observation that nineteenth-century Scottish and American literatures embody certain styles, subjects and preoccupations which characteristically distinguish them from English literature of the same period. Its purpose is to investigate, describe and account for these qualities, and to examine their critical consequences in some of the major works of fiction written by Scottish and American writers between 1800 and 1860. My initial assumption is that the writing of Calvin provides a focus – though not necessarily a source – for the distinctive features of Scottish and American literature; the argument proceeds by considering the modulations sustained by the language of puritanism between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, from theological to philosophical to political and finally to literary contexts. From these I derive the contours of what I have called the puritan-provincial mind.

It is perhaps necessary to stress at the outset that this is an essay in literary criticism, not literary history, the history of ideas or a comparative study of influences. Historical influence is not, in the main, at issue from one writer to the next, or even from puritanism to all of the provincial attitudes I identify in later writing. The primary concern is rather with a particular use of language and with the literary consequences of the assumptions that lie behind it. The early chapters, therefore, are not ‘background’, but integral to the inquiry. Calvin's language in the Institutes of the Christian Religion reflects and expresses a view of life just as Hawthorne's or Scott's fictional prose does; indeed, as I argue, the way his language organises the world has profound similarities with the shape and concerns of their fiction.