Abstract
On 17 November 1978, US Congressman Leo Ryan travelled to Guyana in order to investigate the jungle encampment led by controversial preacher Jim Jones. Less than 24 hours later, Ryan was dead, gunned down by followers of the man known as ‘Dad’ to his acolytes.1 In the hours that followed, almost every man, woman, and child who lived in the Jonestown settlement perished, many of them willing participants in what Jones dubbed ‘Revolutionary Suicide’.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This account of the final hours of life in Jonestown is taken from T. Reiterman (1982, 2008) Raven: The Untold Story of the Reverend Jim Jones and his People (New York: Penguin), 487–569.
J.E. Hall (2004) Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (New York: Transaction Publishers), 191.
S. Bercovitch (1996) The Cambridge History of American Literature (London: Cambridge University Press), 32.
A. Bradstreet, ‘To My Dear Children’ cited in D. Anderson (1999) A House Divided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 9.
J. Stockwell (1998) The Encyclopaedia of American Communes, 1663–1963 (North Carolina: McFarland), 3.
C. Berryman (1979) From Wilderness to Wasteland: The Trials of the Puritan God in the American Imagination (New York: National University Publications, Kennikat Press), 21.
P. Miller (1996) Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 15.
P. Boyer and S. Nissenbaum (1974) Salem Possessed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), XIII.
These theories are outlined in more detail in P. Bartel (2000) Spellcasters: Witches and Witchcraft in History (Lanham: Taylor), 130–155.
P. Kafer (2005) Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press), 115.
J.G. Frank (1950) ‘The Wieland Family in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland’, Monatshefte, Vol. 42, No. 7 (Nov.), 347–353.
Details cited in H. Brogan (2001) The Penguin History of the USA (London: Penguin), 93–94.
J. Tompkins (1986) Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
A.G. Lloyd-Smith (2000) ‘Nineteenth-Century American Gothic’ in D. Punter (ed.) A Companion to the Gothic (London: Blackwell), 111.
A.G. Lloyd-Smith (1989) Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa’s Face (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press), 24.
N. Hawthorne (1835, 2008) ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’ in Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics), 59.
N. Hawthorne (1850) The Scarlet Letter (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth), 22.
R. Miller (2009) American Literary History, 21(3): 464–491.
C. Ryskamp (1959) ‘The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter’, American Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Nov.), 257–272.
J. Stockwell (1998) The Encyclopaedia of American Communes, 1663–1963 (North Carolina: McFarland), 40.
N. Hawthorne (1852, 2009) The Blithedale Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
M. Zuckerman (1977) ‘Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity and the Maypole at Merry Mount’, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 2, 255.
N. Hawthorne (1835) ‘Young Goodman Brown’, Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics), 350.
M. Rowlandson (1676) ‘The Sovereignty and Goodness of God’ in N. Philbrick and T. Philbrick (eds) The Mayflower Papers: Selected Writing of Colonial New England (New York: Penguin, 2007), 179.
S. Jackson (1956, 1996) The Witchcraft of Salem Village (New York, Random House).
H.E. Nebeker (1974) ‘The Lottery as Symbolic Tour de Force’, American Literature, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Mar.), 100–108.
S. Jackson (2010) ‘The Lottery’ in Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories (New York: The Library of America), 227.
T. Tryon (1974) Harvest Home (New York: Hodder Stoughton), 33.
S.T. Joshi (2001) The Modern Weird Tale (North Carolina: McFarland), 195.
T.E.D. Klein (1984) The Ceremonies (London: Pan), 63.
A. Cooke (1996) Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements (New York: Arcade Publishing), 40.
J.C. Oates (2011) The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (New York: The Mysterious Press).
F. Oehlschlaeger (1988) ‘The Stoning of Mistress Hutchinson: Meaning and Context in “The Lottery”’, Essays in Literature, Vol. XV, No. 2 (Fall), 259–265.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Bernice M. Murphy
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Murphy, B.M. (2013). ‘We Are But a Little Way in the Forest Yet’: The Community in the Wilderness. In: The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353726_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353726_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46972-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-35372-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)