SOURCE: “Of Plymouth Plantation as a Mercantile Epic,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1972, pp. 231-42.

In the essay below, Griffith examines the oppositions between economic and spiritual concerns and between the individual and the community in Bradford's History, characterizing the work as a “mercantile epic” in which the tragic conflicts are presented in economic and commerical terms.

The era of New Criticism may have exhausted itself in its rapt insistence on treating the literary work as an autonomous artistic construct whose deepest significance is divorced from such externalities as history, psychology, or sociology. But there remain some formidable and valuable works which seem never to have benefited from the New Critical truths and which suffer a certain kind of neglect because their literariness is not fully recognized. William Bradford's great history Of Plymouth Plantation is one such work. In a casual way, it has long been acknowledged as...