The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America [Paperback]

The subject of Michael Warners book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking ones place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from changes in the culture of printing in the early eighteenth century. The new and widespread use of print media transformed the relations between people and power in a way that set in motion the republican structure of government we have inherited. Examining books, pamphlets, and circulars, he merges theory and concrete analysis to provide a multilayered view of American cultural development.Michael Warners compact discourse on the meaning of the printed word in eighteenth-century America will be recognized by every reader as an extraordinarily ingenious contribution, and one of lasting lasting importance, to the study of republicanism and to the history of print& Warners notion of a socially and culturally limited public sphere, inhabited by participants in a depersonalized, largely printed discourse, not only rings true to the evidence but provides a powerful aid in articulating the nature and limits of republicanism.Arguing the inseparableness of print and culture, this is one of the most engaging books about eighteenth-century American publishing in decades.Michael Warner captures better than anyone else I know the way a new technology and the practices related to it can enable a new social formation to crystallize. In doing so Warner provides us with a terribly important lesson in how to conceive of society and more particularly how to understand the functioning of society within the condition of Western modernity. An excellent book.Innovative in conception, resourcefully argued, The Letters of the Republic will certainly become one of the indispensable books on eighteenth-century American literary history. [This] lucid study&is marked throughout by a distilled, matulӳ