The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America / Edition 2

The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America / Edition 2

by Michael Warner
ISBN-10:
0674527860
ISBN-13:
9780674527867
Pub. Date:
01/01/1992
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
ISBN-10:
0674527860
ISBN-13:
9780674527867
Pub. Date:
01/01/1992
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America / Edition 2

The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America / Edition 2

by Michael Warner

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Overview

The subject of Michael Warner's book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking one's place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from changes in the culture of printing in the early eighteenth century. The new and widespread use of print media transformed the relations between people and power in a way that set in motion the republican structure of government we have inherited. Examining books, pamphlets, and circulars, he merges theory and concrete analysis to provide a multilayered view of American cultural development.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674527867
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 01/01/1992
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. He is the editor of American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King and Fear of a Queer Planet. He also writes for The Nation, The Advocate, The Village Voice, and other periodicals.

Table of Contents

Preface

The Cultural Mediation of the Print Medium

The Res Publica of Letters

Franklin: The Representational Politics of the Man of Letters

Textuality and Legitimacy in the Printed Constitution

Nationalism and the Problem of Republican Literature

The Novel: Fantasies of Publicity

Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

Overall, the writing is marvelously economical and precise ... The book is original without being forced; the originality lies in both the fundamental scheme and in the careful readings of particular materials.

Lawrence Buell

Innovative in conception, resourcefully argued, The Letters of the Republic will certainly become one of the indispensable books on eighteenth-century American literary history. [This] lucid study...is marked throughout by a distilled, mature intellection that is rare even in senior scholars and in a younger scholar's first book most extraordinary
Lawrence Buell, Harvard University

Jay Fliegelman

The Letters of the Republic is a highly original book of great explanatory power, one that fills a gaping hole in the secondary literature of eighteenth-century American culture and brings a theoretical sophistication to the literary history of that period rarely encountered in the scholarship this is an important and in many ways remarkable book. It is written with grace and with a broad intelligence always in evidence.
Jay Fliegelman, Stanford University

David Hall

Overall, the writing is marvelously economical and precise ... The book is original without being forced; the originality lies in both the fundamental scheme and in the careful readings of particular materials.
David Hall, Harvard University

Sacvan Bercovitch

A brilliant revaluation of eighteenth-century America, a work of extraordinary learning and sustained insight, with far-reaching implications, both practical and theoretical, for the study of literature and culture through the Revolutionary and Federalist eras, and beyond. It establishes Michael Warner unquestionably as a major critic and a leading Americanist.
Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University

Charles Taylor

Michael Warner captures better than anyone else I know the way a new technology and the practices related to it can enable a new social formation to crystallize. In doing so Warner provides us with a terribly important lesson in how to conceive of society and more particularly how to understand the functioning of society within the condition of Western modernity. An excellent book.
Charles Taylor, McGill University

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