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The Columbia History of the American NovelFrom this late twentieth-century vantage point, however, with cultural studies revealing ways in which technology is but one part of a larger cultural process, it is possible to reconsider the relation of technology to the novel, in part by surveying the ideological role of technology in national narratives dating from the seventeenth century, and in addition by taking Pound's statement as a factual, not a metaphoric, one when considering the relation of fiction to technology of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, technology was integral with representations of the New World before it found expression in the American novel. Colonial New England writers had particular millennial motives to -467- privilege technological power in their writings, since they thought it a means of expediting the Christian Millennium. While the Puritan minister Increase Mather was denouncing "vain romances," meaning novels imported into the colonies, his Puritan cohort Edward Johnson, a Massachusetts town clerk and engineer, wrote The Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New-England (1653), a historical narrative in which the Christian army, called to the New World, prepares for the Second Coming of Christ by carving farms and villages from the North American wilds ...» |
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