SOURCE: “William Bradford's American Sublime” in PMLA, Vol. 102, No. 1, 1987, pp. 55-65.

In this essay, Laurence suggests that Bradford's seeming anticipations of both the Romantic concept of the sublime and the unique qualities of American literature help to expand scholarly notions of those literary categories.

Sometime in 1630 William Bradford, perennial governor of Plymouth Plantation in New England, recorded for posterity the inhospitable, wintry scene on which the pursuit of separatist convictions had landed an obscure company of plain English country folk a decade earlier, in November 1620:

But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people's present condition; and so I think will the reader, too, when he well considers the same. Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembered by that which went before), they had now no friends...