From our survey of the broader contours of the New England imagination we turn now to its regionally oriented aspects, its historical literature and its literature of place. These, by and large, exhibit the same primary traits so far identified: a concentration on poetry and prose, as opposed to drama; a strong rhetorical and didactic element, frequently offset by aesthetic distancing; a tendency to achieve originality by working disruptively within conventionalized patterns; a fondness for playing the formal off against the vernacular; and a markedly Protestant ideology. With these as instruments, New England writers re-created their region as a literary artifact. In this chapter we begin examination of the key ingredient, the myth of Puritan antecedence.

As we shall see, it was during our period that America's stereotypes about the Puritans fully crystallized and began to exert a fascination for creative writers that still runs strong today. The notion of America's Puritan legacy, in both its Jekyll and its Hyde aspects, is the legacy of the writers we are about to survey.