The literary reinvention of Puritanism was only part of the more far-eaching project of articulating all of New England culture and its institutions in literary form. This larger project preceded and outlasted the vogue of historical writing, at its height between 1820 and 1850. This chapter and the next four will examine some characteristic ways in which New England writing codified the regional sense of place.

Here, as before, the Revolutionary era supplies a somewhat arbitrary yet justifiable starting point. It is arbitrary in the sense that the New England landscape and ethos had already been mapped in some detail by early explorers, by Puritan historians, and by diarists and travelers like Samuel Sewall and Sarah Kemble Knight. It is justifiable, however, in that post-Revolutionary literary nationalist aesthetics tended temporarily to suppress and erase old-style colonial attachments and to create at least the illusion that any future regionalism would have to build itself anew.