Download Free Letters And Cultural Transformations In The United States 1760 1860 Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Letters And Cultural Transformations In The United States 1760 1860 and write the review.

This volume illustrates the significance of epistolarity as a literary phenomenon intricately interwoven with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural developments. Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection of essays demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras. Sections of the collection treat letters' implication in transatlanticism, authorship, and reform movements as well as the politics and practices of editing letters. The wide range of authors considered include Mercy Otis Warren, Charles Brockden Brown, members of the Emerson and Peabody families, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stoddard, Catherine Brown, John Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. The volume is particularly relevant for researchers in U.S. literature and history, as well as women's writing and periodical studies. This dynamic collection offers scholars an exemplary template of new approaches for exploring an understudied yet critically important literary genre.
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is a key writer of the revolutionary era and U.S. early republic, known for his landmark novels and other writings in a variety of genres. The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown presents all of Brown's non-novelistic writings--letters, political pamphlets, fiction, periodical writings, historical writings, and poetry--in a seven-volume scholarly edition. The edition's volumes are edited to the highest scholarly standards and will bear the seal of the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions (MLA-CSE). Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, volume 1 of the series, presents, for the first time, Brown's complete extant correspondence along with three early epistolary fiction fragments. Brown's 179 extant letters provide essential context for reading his other works and a wealth of information about his life, family, associates, and the wider cultural life of the revolutionary period and Early Republic. The letters document the interactions of Brown's intellectual and literary circles in Philadelphia and during his New York years, when his publishing career began in earnest. The correspondence additionally includes exchanges with notables including Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin. The volume's three epistolary fragments are the earliest examples of Brown's fiction and are transcribed here for the first time in complete and definitive texts. The volume's historical texts are fully annotated and accompanied by Historical and Textual Essays, as well as other appended materials, including the most complete and accurate information available concerning Brown's correspondents and family history. The scholarly work informing this volume establishes significant new findings concerning Brown, his family and friends, and the circumstances of his development as a major literary figure of the revolutionary Atlantic world.
This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.
This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.
Over the past few decades, the writings of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) have reclaimed a place of prominence in the American literary canon. Yet despite the explosion of teaching, research, and an ever-increasing number of doctoral dissertations, there remains no up-to-date overview of Brown's work. The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides a state-of-the-art survey of the life and writings of Charles Brockden Brown, a key writer of the Atlantic revolutionary age and U.S. Early Republic. The seven novels he published during his lifetime are now studied for their narrative complexity, innovations in genre, and social-political commentaries on life in early America and the revolutionary Atlantic. Through the late twentieth century, Brown was best known as an author of political romances in the gothic mode that proved to be widely influential in romantic era, and has generated large amounts of scholarship as a crucial figure in the history of the American novel. This Handbook extends its focus beyond the well-known novels to address the full range of Brown's prolific literary career. The Handbook includes original essays on all of Brown's fiction and nonfiction writings, and offers new interpretations of the contexts of his work: from the literary, social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The thirty-five contributors in this volume speak in new ways about Brown's depictions of literary theory, social justice, sexuality, and property relations, as well as colonialism, slavery, Native Americans, and women's rights. Brown's perspectives on American and global history, emerging modernity, selfhood and otherness, and other topics, are explained in comprehensible and up-to-date terms. In addition to opening up new avenues of research, The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides the intellectual foundations needed to understand Brown's enduring impact and literary legacy.
Through extended readings of the works of P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Fanny Fern, Bonnie Carr O’Neill shows how celebrity culture authorizes audiences to evaluate public figures on personal terms and in so doing reallocates moral, intellectual, and affective authority and widens the public sphere. O’Neill examines how celebrity culture creates a context in which citizens regard one another as public figures while elevating individual public figures to an unprecedented personal fame. Although this new publicity fosters nationalism, it also imbues public life with personal feeling and transforms the public sphere into a site of divisive, emotionally intense debate. Further, O’Neill analyzes how celebrity culture’s scrutiny of the lives and personalities of public figures collapses distinctions between the public and private spheres and, as a consequence, challenges assumptions about the self and personhood. Celebrity culture intensifies the complex emotions and debates surrounding already-fraught questions of national belonging and democratic participation even as, for some, it provides a means of redefining personhood and cultural identity. O’Neill offers a new critical approach within the growing scholarship on celebrity studies by exploring the relationship between the emergence of celebrity culture and civic discourse. Her careful readings unravel the complexities of a form of publicity that fosters both mass consumption and cultural criticism.
In March of 1861 Texas seceded from the Union, and the Love brothers of Limestone County—Cyrus, Samuel, James, and John—enlisted to fight for the Confederate cause. For the next four years, the brothers travelled the war-torn South as cavalry in Terry's Texas Rangers, seeing action in some of the fiercest battles in the Western Theater, yet faithfully sending letters home to their expectant family. Complete with a scholarly introduction shedding insight into the Love family, their travels, and their family communication network, this volume collects, transcribes, and annotates 78 letters by eight authors spanning the entire Civil War. In addition to soldiers’ correspondence, the collection also contains letters written to and from their female relatives on the domestic front. Yours in Filial Regards: The Civil War Letters of a Texas Family offers a fascinating inside perspective of the Civil War from both the Confederate battle lines and the home front.
Spanning three centuries, this book demonstrates a variety of archival practices to tell more expansive stories about Black women. It examines the life writing, records, and ephemera of Black women such as political reformer Sydna E. R. Francis, educators Edmonia Highgate and Lucy F. Simms, travel writer Nancy Prince, poet June Jordan, novelist Jesmyn Ward, and self-liberator Matilda Hawkins Tyler, enslaved by her own Jesuit church at St. Louis University. The contributors use oral histories, data visualization, and biographical documents and narratives to map these and countless anonymized stories across geographic locations. Tracking the voluntary and forced movement of Black women alongside the places and spaces they inhabit gives us richer, more contextualized histories. The authors probe and answer how these women moved through and beyond systemic barriers and physical dangers while placing themselves at the center of change. The stories crystalize the joys, horrors, quotidian experiences, and endurance of marginalized lives. Each chapter illustrates ways to build archival and theoretical spaces that interrogate the many ways that Black women have navigated formidable and dangerous lands. This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to students and researchers of comparative literature, gender studies, and Black studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.
Traditional histories of the American transcendentalist movement begin in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s terms: describing a rejection of college books and church pulpits in favor of the individual power of “Man Thinking.” This essay collection asks how women who lacked the privileges of both college and clergy rose to thought. For them, reading alone and conversing together were the primary means of growth, necessarily in private and informal spaces both overlapping with those of the men and apart from them. But these were means to achieving literary, aesthetic, and political authority—indeed, to claiming utopian possibility for women as a whole. Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism is a project of both archaeology and reinterpretation. Many of its seventeen distinguished and rising scholars work from newly recovered archives, and all offer fresh readings of understudied topics and texts. First quickened by the 2010 bicentennial of Margaret Fuller’s birth, the project reaches beyond Fuller to her female predecessors, contemporaries, and successors throughout the nineteenth century who contributed to or grew from the transcendentalist movement. Geographic scope also widens—from the New England base to national and transatlantic spheres. A shared goal is to understand this “genealogy” within a larger history of American women writers; no absolute boundaries divide idealism from sentiment, romantics from realists, or white discourse from black. Primary-text interludes invite readers into the ongoing task of discovering and interpreting transcendentally affiliated women. This collection recognizes the vibrant contributions women made to a major literary movement and will appeal to both scholars and general readers.
This four-volume collection of primarily newly transcribed manuscript material brings together sources from both sides of the Atlantic and from a wide variety of regional archives. It is the first collection of its kind, allowing comparisons between the development of the family in England and America during a time of significant change. Volume 4: Managing Families, II In this final volume documents are focused on some of the more negative aspects of family life. Sections focus on authority, power and discontent; violence and conflict; and death and mourning. Topics include estate disputes, contested marriages, spousal abuse, deaths, wills and memorials.