Rites of Assent

<p><em>The Rites of Assent</em> examines the cultural strategies through which "America" served as a vehicle simultaneously for diversity and cohesion, fusion and fragmentation. Taking an ethnographic, cross-cultural approach, <em>The Rites of Assent</em> traces the meanings and purposes of "America" back to the colonial typology of mission, and specifically (in chapters on Puritan rhetoric, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the movement from Revival to Revolution) to the legacy of early New England.</p> Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Music of America 2. The Ritual of Consensus 3. The Ends of Puritan Rhetoric 4. Cotton Mather and the Vision of America 5. The Typology of Mission, from Edwards to Independence 6. Continuing Revolution: George Bancroft and the Myth of Progress 7. The Return of Hester Prynne 8. Pierre , or the Ambiguities of Literary History 9. Emerson, Individualism, and Liberal Dissent 10. The Problem of Ideology in American Literary Studies Endnotes Index