Early American Literature

Abstract:

Consisting of a mere seven sentences full of commonplace and repetitive words, the Mayflower Compact has been celebrated as an important historical, legal, and political document, but overlooked from a literary point of view. In directing our attention to the Compact's language, however, we find a text whose literary and legal significance lies in the very qualities that kept most readers away: the banality of its words and their semantic repetition, or what is known as synonymy.