Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Salem and the Selling of American Selfhood
1. The What That’s in a Name: Settling On an American Puritanism
2. Hawthorne, Gaddis, and Models of American Identity
3. Alien Abduction as Captivity Nonnarrative in Slaughterhouse-Five
4. Thomas Pynchon, the Sloth of Salvation, and Becoming Converted
5. Rereading Puritan Spiritual Autobiography in Gilead
6. Types of Exceptionalism: Colson Whitehead, Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, Paul Auster
7. America before Puritanism: or, Toni Morrison’s Decentered English Origin
Conclusion: Tituba, Hopefully, Unknowable
Notes
Works Cited
Index