Anne Bradstreet's family plots: puritanism, humanism, posthumanism

This article explores the interface between textuality and materiality—of bodies, things, and places—in Bradstreet’s writings; an intersection where Bradstreet resists and revises the spiritual metaphors of the male coterie within which she produced and published her poems, turning them instead toward living engagements with place. Focusing on her poem, “Contemplations,” and the manuscript writings in the “Andover Manuscript,” I argue that Bradstreet’s sustained involvement with the local, immediate, material world grafts Puritanism’s spiritual and spatial allegories to the physical actualities of place, with results that trouble and decenter their univocal force. Reintroducing materiality into a reading of Bradstreet’s works, I contend, brings realignment of orthodoxy to originality to the fore
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