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Land, Labor, And Colonial Economics In Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan", Michelle Burnham

English

As long as critics have written about it, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan has been positioned as a counterhistory to William Brad ford's canonical Of Plymouth Plantation. One vein of critical reception has dismissed Morton's text as a flawed literary anomaly, effectively re peating Bradford's own befuddled and anxious response to Morton's aes thetics.1 A smaller but impassioned vein of literary criticism has, in turn, elevated Morton over Bradford on the basis of his egalitarianism, proto environmentalism, or multiculturalism avant la lettre?essentially cele brating Morton as a more laudable expression of individualism and free dom than that represented by the …