Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America

by Shields, David S.

• ISBN13: 9780807846568
• ISBN10: 0807846562
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-05-01
• Publisher: Omohundro Inst of Early Amer

Summary

"Here is literary history that in an exemplary manner links the history of taste and aesthetics with the social history of literary production. "David D. Hall, Harvard UniversityThe discourse of civility in British America's taverns, tea rooms, salons, coffee houses, card parties, clubs, and fraternitiesIn cities from Boston to Charleston, elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in private venues to script a polite culture, By examining their various "texts" -- conversations, letters, newspapers, and privately circulated manuscripts -- David Shields reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America."In this wonderful book, David Shields brilliantly recovers the disappeared world of eighteenth-century belle lettres as a set of socially situated performances taking place at coffeehouses, private societies, literary salons, clubs, colleges, balls, and gaming tables. Whether poetry or prose, these circulated texts, written not for posterity but as group communications, served to display wit, to create shared pleasure, and to preserve genteel society. Shields's Civil Tongues and Polite Letters permanently changes our understanding of eighteenth-century literary history and offers a powerful account of the fate of social pleasure in American culture". -- Jay Fliegelman, Stanford University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
List of Illustrations	xi
Introduction: Of Civil Discourse and Private Society	xiii
Prologue	1	(5)
Overture: The Promise of Civil Discourse	6	(5)
Belles Lettres and the Arenas of Metropolitan Conversation	11	(44)
A Conversation in the Suburbs	22	(4)
Politeness and Wit	26	(2)
The Model of Belles Lettres	28	(3)
Sociability	31	(6)
Gentility and Taste	37	(3)
The Spas and the Sexes	40	(6)
The Profanations of Grub Street	46	(9)
Coffeehouse and Tavern	55	(44)
Henry Brooke: The Poet as Agent of Urbanity	65	(14)
Tavern Talk Transfigured	79	(9)
Beyond Politeness	88	(11)
Tea Tables and Salons	99	(42)
Tea and Sympathy	104	(22)
The Garden of Sensibility	126	(15)
Rites of Assembly	141	(34)
At the Ball	145	(13)
Card Games and the Muse	158	(3)
The Sphinx's Challenge	161	(4)
Crambo	165	(3)
The Contest of Wit	168	(7)
The Clubs	175	(34)
The Brotherhood of Fish	189	(9)
The Practice of Good Fellowship	198	(11)
The College, the Press, and the Public	209	(66)
Elegy and the College Cult of Memory	219	(7)
The Religious Sublime	226	(10)
The Polite Christian	236	(7)
Famous Characters and the Defamer	243	(19)
The Duplicities of Print	262	(4)
Old Janus	266	(9)
Gaining Admission	275	(33)
The Rapid Rise of Dr. Dale	277	(24)
An Anatomy of Hospitality	301	(7)
Toward the Polite Republic	308	(21)
Index	329