Colonial Period Of American Literature

Reading Colonial American Lit Without Losing Your Mind

The biggest problem people run into when approaching the colonial period is expecting it to read like literature. It doesn't. Most of what was produced in the 1600s and early 1700s was functional writing — sermons, journals, captivity narratives, political tracts. You read it for the raw material it contains, not for stylistic pleasure. The prose is flat by design. The authors didn't care about craft the way later writers did because they were writing to serve God, colony, or party. Start with the primary sources themselves, not the textbooks. Textbooks summarize these writers through a modern lens and strip out the theological context that made the writing make sense at the time. If you're going to read Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," read the actual sermon, not a paragraph saying it's "about damnation." The original is three pages long. It takes twenty minutes. You'll understand more from the sermon than from any study guide. For the heavy stuff, I use the Norton Anthology of American Literature, short volume. It has decent headnotes that at least tell you when and why something was written. The bedrock texts you actually need to encounter are Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity," the various captivity narratives by Mary Rowlandson andIncrease Mather, Bradstreet's poems, Taylor's metaphysical verse, and Franklin's autobiography. Everything else builds off these.

The theological barrier most people hit

Here's something most intro courses skip: you cannot understand colonial writing without understanding Calvinist theology. The whole thing runs on predestination, original sin, and the idea that the individual soul is in direct relationship with God, not with any church hierarchy. That's why everything feels so intensely personal and so simultaneously despairing. It's not a mood. It's doctrine. When Bradstreet writes about her children dying, she's not just being a grieving mother — she's working through the theological problem of how a loving God can take His elect children. That's the subtext under almost everything from this period. I had a student once who couldn't get past Edward Taylor's poetry, calling it "pretentious religious garbage." We spent an hour just mapping out his conceits — the extended metaphors that link spiritual experiences to objects from daily colonial life. A spider catching a fly becomes the soul trapped by sin. A burning fire becomes the Holy Spirit. Once he saw the mechanics, the poems became readable. They're still not great poems by later standards, but they're intelligible. The conceit technique itself was borrowed from John Donne and the English metaphysical poets, which most people don't realize when they first encounter it.

The diary and journal problem

Primary source journals from this period are notoriously difficult to parse. Spelling wasn't standardized. Words meant different things. "Fasciculus" in Winthrop's journal doesn't mean a flower bouquet — it's a bundle of papers or documents. "Consignees" doesn't mean people receiving shipments — it means those bound over to authority. I developed a habit of keeping a running glossary of archaic colonial terms while reading, and I cross-reference with the Oxford English Dictionary's historical entries when a word won't yield. It adds about ten minutes per page but prevents misreading entirely. Another thing nobody warns you about: colonial diaries are episodic, not narrative. Bradford records events in bursts — a storm, a death, a council meeting, then nothing for weeks. Modern readers expect plot. There is no plot. You have to accept that you're reading a record, not a story, or you'll spend the whole time frustrated looking for structure that isn't there.

What the period actually covers and where it ends

The Colonial Period Of American Literature generally spans 1600 to 1776, though some scholars extend it to 1800. The starting point is arbitrary — you could argue it begins with the Spanish in Florida or with Indigenous oral traditions that preceded European contact by centuries, but that's a separate conversation. The standard curriculum focuses on English colonial writing from Jamestown onward. The period breaks into rough phases. The first phase, roughly 1600-1650, is dominated by explorers and early settlers writing practical documents — Jamestown accounts, ship logs, religious tracts justifying settlement. The Puritan period, 1630-1700, produces the bulk of what gets assigned in courses. The Enlightenment phase, roughly 1700-1776, shifts toward reason, science, and political argument. Franklin lives in this window and represents the transition away from theology toward empiricism.

A thing nobody tells you about testing on this material

If you're studying this for an exam, don't memorize themes. Memorize texts and dates. Professors can tell when you've memorized a generic essay about "Puritan values" versus when you've actually read the sources. Citing a specific line from Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" with the publication date and context shows you did the work. Saying "Puritans believed in hard work" gets you a B. Saying "In 'The Author to Her Book,' Bradstreet compares her poems to an ill-fledged chick that she wishes she could reshape before presenting to the world, revealing her anxiety about divine versus human authorship" gets you an A because it's specific and text-grounded. The same applies to essays. Every claim you make should be tied to a specific passage. Generalizations about the colonial mind are untestable and therefore worthless in an academic context. If you can't point to the words on the page, you don't have an argument.

Resources that are actually worth your time

Project Gutenberg has public domain texts of most colonial works. The Online Library of Liberty has a solid collection too, with some contextual material attached. For scholarly context, the Encyclopedia of American Literature has decent entries, though they're not always reliable on technical points. If you're doing serious research, JSTOR is where you go, but you need institutional access. One specific tool I found useful: the Early American Imprints database. It's subscription-based, usually available through university libraries, and it lets you search the full text of colonial-era prints. If you're writing a paper and need to know how a particular word was used in 1740, this is the place to look. It's tedious but thorough.

When this approach falls apart

The caveat I need to make: this method works if you're trying to understand the literature on its own terms. It doesn't work well if your goal is to find literary beauty or emotional resonance in the strict sense. Some of these texts are powerful, but powerfully in a historical document sense, not in a lyrical sense. If you're approaching this expecting the kind of experience you get from reading Dickinson or Whitman, you're going to be disappointed. The emotional weight is there, but it's buried under doctrinal framing and archaic syntax that requires work to unpack. The reward is intellectual rather than aesthetic, and that distinction matters for setting your expectations. There's also the limitation that the standard canon is incredibly narrow. It's almost entirely white, male, New England writing. Mary Rowlandson is the notable exception on gender, and her narrative gets included precisely because it's a captivity story, which gives it a marketability that pure theology doesn't have. Indigenous perspectives, enslaved people's writing, Spanish colonial writing, and women's domestic records are largely absent from traditional course readings. If you want a fuller picture, you have to seek out supplemental materials yourself. Nothing in a standard survey text will give you that breadth.