American Literature / Unit 3 AML 0224 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Dating a Colonial Passage From Its Prose
The idea
A passage from this period can be placed without a date attached. Spellings and capitals are the first clue, since early modern printing capitalizes nouns and varies spelling freely, so a passage capitalizing Heathen, Religion and Ways is seventeenth or eighteenth century and not later. Sentence shape is the second, since long accumulating clauses joined by and, with the verb late, belong to the period before the Revolution. Vocabulary is the third: providence, affliction, deliverance and mercies mark a Puritan frame; commodities, plantation and adventurers mark a promotional one; savages and heathen mark a colonist writing about Native peoples, in the period's own usage rather than the course's. Content confirms: a narrative of capture and return is a captivity narrative, and those cluster in the late seventeenth century.
In practice
Capitals, clauses, vocabulary, then content.
Where people slip
A Native-authored text of the period uses the same religious vocabulary, as Occom's narrative does, so vocabulary places the period and not the writer. Deciding who is speaking takes the content.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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