The Complicity of Imagination examines the rich and complex relationship among four nineteenth-century authors and the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England. This study portrays an American Renaissance whose writers were deeply enough read in the literature and controversies of seventeenth-century England to appropriate its cultural artifacts for their own purposes. By exploring the broader cultural implications of intertextual relationships, this book demonstrates how literary texts participate in the artistic, political, and theological tensions within American culture.