Ideas of Order

In five chapters ranging from the seventeenth century of Cotton Mather to the late twentieth century of J. Hillis Miller, Ideas of Order explores American literature and proposes that the act of reading is central to its formation and its development. This book outlines America as a literary and rhetorical invention and shows that American fiction also produces America, a place whose very concrete manifestations in the world, such as economy, politics or military power, result from poetic and metaphorical transformations. Ideas of Order proposes that these manifestations of America result
from ethical decisions taken through acts of reading fiction. Thus, the book maps out the “topos,” that is, the space and the place we know as “America” and that acts of reading have produced.