Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War

In this study of the rhetoric of American writings on language, Michael Kramer argues that the prevalent critical distinction between imaginative and nonimaginative writing is of limited theoretical use. Breaking down the artificial, disciplinary barriers between two areas of scholarly inquiry—the literature of the American Renaissance and the study of language in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War—Kramer finds in various walks of intellectual life a broad range of w...