No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
TEXTING A NATION?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
Extract
Since its publication in 2007, Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print has earned a reputation as a trenchant critique of the vision of the pre-1876 United States as a state whose national integrity depended upon the dissemination of print. Commentators fixed particularly on its argument that the early republic never manifested that degree of integration of internal improvements, roads, print technology, and local interests to materialize the Federalist vision of nationhood. In some circles it was hailed as a salutary counter to historians who embrace Benedict Anderson's account of the national imaginary—a virtual nationhood irradiating citizens’ imaginations through reading newspapers and novels that impute national being. Loughran marshaled evidence that no newspaper, certainly no novel, and not even that most legendarily popular imprint, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, enjoyed sufficiently broad distribution to invoke even a coherent fantasy of national identity. In print-culture studies she has emerged as the most vocal chronicler of the fragmented republic. She has earned the respect of those political historians who have pondered the incapacity of public-sphere historiography to account for the republic's drift into the contending sections of the 1830s and the warring states of the 1860s.
- Type
- Review Essays
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011
References
1 Gillmore, William J., Reading Becomes Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
2 Ferguson, Robert, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 124–49Google Scholar.
3 Warner, Michael, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 97–117Google Scholar.
4 Smith, Nigel, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 54–8Google Scholar.
5 Freneau, Philip, “The Country Printer,” Poems Written between the Years 1768 and 1794 (Monmouth: Philip Freneau, 1795), pp. 421–4Google Scholar.
6 Samuel Williams, Cole, History of the Lost State of Franklin (Baltimore: Geneaological Publishing Company, 2009), 301–3Google Scholar.
7 Herman, Bernard L., Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005), 3–5Google Scholar; idem, The Stolen House (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992).
8 Shields, David S., “‘We Delare You Independent Whether You Wish It or Not’”: The Print Culture of Early Filibusterism,” in Shields, David S. and Sloat, Carolina, eds., Liberty, Egalite! Independencia! Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas, 1776–1838 (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 2007), 13–30Google Scholar.
9 Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764, vol. 1 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Carretta, Vincent, “Who Was Francis Williams?”, Early American Literature 38/2 (2003), 213–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Shields, David S., “Happiness in Society: The Development of an Eighteenth-Century American Poetic Ideal,” American Literature 55/4 (Dec. 1983), 541–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Zuchert, Michael, “Natural Rights and Imperial Constitutionalism,” in Paul, Ellen Frankel, Miller, Fred Dycus, Paul, Jeffrey, eds., Natural Rights: Liberalism from Locke to Nozick (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28–55Google Scholar.