Periodical Literature In Eighteenth-century America

by Kamrath, Mark L.; Harris, Sharon M.

• ISBN13: 9781572333192
• ISBN10: 1572333197
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-03-30
• Publisher: Univ of Tennessee Pr

Summary

Similar to the "digital revolution" of the last century, the colonial and early national periods were a time of improved print technologies, exploding information, faster communications, and a fundamental reinventing of publishing and media processes. Between the early 1700s, when periodical publications struggled, and the late 1790s, when print media surged ahead, print culture was radically transformed by a liberal market economy, innovative printing and papermaking techniques, improved distribution processes, and higher literacy rates, meaning that information, particularly in the form of newspapers and magazines, was available more quickly and widely to people than ever before. These changes generated new literary genres and new relationships between authors and their audiences. The study of periodical literature and print culture in the eighteenth century has provided a more intimate view into the lives and tastes of early Americans, as well as enabled researchers to further investigate a plethora of subjects and discourses having to do with the Atlantic world and the formation of an American republic. Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America is a collection of essays that delves into many of these unique magazines and newspapers and their intersections as print media, as well as into what these publications reveal about the cultural, ideological, and literary issues of the period; the resulting research is interdisciplinary, combining the fields of history, literature, and cultural studies. The essays explore many evolving issues in an emerging America: scientific inquiry, race, ethnicity, gender, and religious belief all found voice in various early periodicals. Thedifferences between the pre- and post Revolutionary periodicals and performativity are discussed, as are vital immigration, class, and settlement issues. Political topics, such as the emergence of democratic institutions and dissent, the formation of early parties, and the development of regional, national, and transnational cultural identities are also covered.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	xi
Mark L. Kamrath
Sharon M. Harris
Part I. Atlantic Currents	1	(102)
Pox and ``Hell-Fire'': Boston's Smallpox Controversy, the New Science, and Early Modern Liberalism	7	(22)
Carla Mulford
Imagining a Transatlantic Awakening: The Christian History and the Hermeneutics of Revival	29	(18)
Tim D. Hall
``Incorporated . . . into a Body Politic'': Clubs, Print, and the Gendering of the Civic Subject in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania	47	(28)
John Smolenski
``A Colony of Aliens'': Germans and the German-Language Press in Colonial and Revolutionary Pennsylvania	75	(28)
W. M. Verhoeven
Part II. Revolutionary Era Discourses	103	(118)
``Widely Read by American Patriots'': The New-York Weekly Journal and the Influence of Cato's Letters on Colonial America	109	(34)
Chad Reid
American Indian Oration and Discourses of the Republic in Eighteenth-Century American Periodicals	143	(36)
Mark L. Kamrath
Civil Unrest and the Rhetoric of the American Revolution: Depiction of Shays's Rebellion in New England Magazines of the 1780s	179	(22)
Robert D. Sturr
The African Slave Trade and Abolitionism: Rereading Antislavery Literature, 1776--1800	201	(20)
Philip Gould
Part III. The Early Republic and the 1790s	221	(144)
Exhibiting the Fair Sex: The Massachusetts Magazine and the Bodily Order of the American Woman	227	(28)
Beverly J. Reed
Binding Ties: Thomas Jefferson, Francis Hopkinson, and the Representation of the Notes on the State of Virginia	255	(22)
Frank Shuffelton
``The Ladies in Particular'': Constructions of Femininity in the Gentlemen and Ladies Town and Country Magazine and the Lady's Magazine; and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge	277	(30)
Lisa M. Logan
Reading the Foreign News, Imagining an American Public Sphere: Radical and Conservative Visions of ``the Public'' in Mid-1790s Newspapers	307	(32)
Seth Cotlar
The New- York Magazine: Cultural Repository	339	(26)
Sharon M. Harris
Appendix: American Periodical Series, 1741--1800	365	(6)
Contributors	371	(4)
Index	375