During the past century, literary education, often divorced from rhetoric, has grown increasingly distant from the practice of language in statecraft, law, religion, and ethics. Yet literature and rhetoric retain open, independent powers to enhance what Emerson calls &"the conduct of life.&" In these provocative essays, James Engell argues that a more complete literary training can foster a heightened sense of shared social experience, an awareness of diverse views, a love of language, and a more powerful ability to express the values we enshrine or debate. Revealing a set of deep intersections among literature, politics, rhetoric, and the public deliberation of values, he explores how dedicated individuals of different callings resort to heightened language in order to secure knowledge, test beliefs, consider policy, and promote action. Through profiles of Lincoln, Burke, Swift, Hume, Lowth, Vico, and others, Engell explores the political and ethical involvement of writers with their culture in order to reestablish links between literary qualities of language and the means by which we challenge power and secure liberty. He presents a cogent argument for a different, expanded kind of literary education, suggesting that training in rhetoric, now often misunderstood or neglected, can serve the common good without becoming mired in partisan squabbles or academic pedantry. Despite the dominance of visual media in our society, observes Engell, the difficult problems we face must be resolved through language. By presenting writers who use resourceful language to engage political contests and cultural issues, he contributes to ongoing debates in education, politics, and culture without subscribing to easy labels of &"left&" and &"right&" or &"traditional&" versus &"innovative.&" He demonstrates imaginative ways to apply time-tested literary techniques to a changing world, making use of the past yet in a way that the past could not predict. This passionately argued book calls for a shift in the ways we teach and regard literature.

Reading These United States explores the relationship between early American literature and federalism in the early decades of the republic. As a federal republic, the United States constituted an unusual model of national unity, defined by the representation of its variety rather than its similarities. Taking the federal structure of the nation as a foundational point, Keri Holt examines how popular print—including almanacs, magazines, satires, novels, and captivity narratives—encouraged citizens to recognize and accept the United States as a union of differences. Challenging the prevailing view that early American print culture drew citizens together by establishing common bonds of language, sentiment, and experience, she argues that early American literature helped define the nation, paradoxically, by drawing citizens apart—foregrounding, rather than transcending, the regional, social, and political differences that have long been assumed to separate them. The book offers a new approach for studying print nationalism that transforms existing arguments about the political and cultural function of print in the early United States, while also offering a provocative model for revising the concept of the nation itself. Holt also breaks new ground by incorporating an analysis of literature into studies of federalism and connects the literary politics of the early republic with antebellum literary politics—a bridge scholars often struggle to cross.

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas opens a window onto classical receptions across the Hispanophone, Lusophone, Francophone and Anglophone Americas during the early modern period, examining classical reception as a phenomenon in transhemispheric perspective for the first

An in-depth look at the life and times of the early American poet and polemicist. Poet, republican, diplomat, and entrepreneur, Joel Barlow filled many roles and registered impressive accomplishments. In the first biography of this fascinating figure in decades, Richard Buel Jr. recounts the life of a man more intimately connected to the Age of Revolution than perhaps any other American. Barlow was a citizen of the revolutionary world, and his adventures throughout the United States and Europe during both the American and French Revolutions are numerous and notorious. From writing his epic poem, The Vision of Columbus, to plotting a republican revolution in Britain to negotiating the release of American sailors taken captive by Barbary pirates, Joel Barlow personified the true spirit of the tumultuous times in which he lived. No one witnessed more climactic events or interacted with more significant people than Joel Barlow. His unique vision, his unfailing belief in republicanism, and his entrepreneurial spirit drove him to pursue the revolutionary ideal in a way more emblematic of the age than the lives of many of its prominent heroes. In telling Barlow’s story, Buel explores the cultural landscape of the early American republic and engages the broader themes of the Age of Revolution. Few books explore in such a comprehensive fashion the political, economic, ideological, diplomatic, and technological dimensions of this defining moment in world history. “No earlier biographer has given nearly as detailed and rich a portrait of Barlow’s perhaps singularly expansive role in the cultural life, commerce, politics, and intrigue of the age of revolution.” —TheGuardian (UK)

Organized primarily in terms of genre, this handbook includes original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades.

The first volume of an ambitious new economic history of American higher education. Exchange of Ideas launches a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. In this volume, Adam R. Nelson focuses on the early republic, explaining how knowledge itself became a commodity, as useful ideas became salable goods and American colleges were drawn into transatlantic commercial relations. American scholars might once have imagined that higher education could sit beyond the sphere of market activity—that intellectual exchange could transcend vulgar consumerism—but already by the end of the eighteenth century, they saw how ideas could be factored into the nation’s balance of trade. Moreover, they concluded that it was the function of colleges to oversee the complex process whereby knowledge could be priced and purchased. The history of capitalism and the history of higher education, Nelson reveals, are intimately intertwined—which raises a host of important and strikingly urgent questions. How do we understand knowledge and education as commercial goods? Who should pay for them? And, fundamentally, what is the optimal system of higher education in a capitalist democracy?

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Paul Giles traces the paradoxical relations between English and American literature from 1730 through 1860, suggesting how the formation of a literary tradition in each national culture was deeply dependent upon negotiation with its transatlantic counterpart. Using the American Revolution as the fulcrum of his argument, Giles describes how the impulse to go beyond conventions of British culture was crucial in the establishment of a distinct identity for American literature. Similarly, he explains the consolidation of British cultural identity partly as a response to the need to suppress the memory and consequences of defeat in the American revolutionary wars. Giles ranges over neglected American writers such as Mather Byles and the Connecticut Wits as well as better-known figures like Franklin, Jefferson, Irving, and Hawthorne. He reads their texts alongside those of British authors such as Pope, Richardson, Equiano, Austen, and Trollope. Taking issue with more established utopian narratives of American literature, Transatlantic Insurrections analyzes how elements of blasphemous, burlesque humor entered into the making of the subject.

In this innovative study, David Waldstreicher investigates the importance of political festivals in the early American republic. Drawing on newspapers, broadsides, diaries, and letters, he shows how patriotic celebrations and their reproduction in a rapidly expanding print culture helped connect local politics to national identity. Waldstreicher reveals how Americans worked out their political differences in creating a festive calendar. Using the Fourth of July as a model, members of different political parties and social movements invented new holidays celebrating such events as the ratification of the Constitution, Washington's birthday, Jefferson's inauguration, and the end of the slave trade. They used these politicized rituals, he argues, to build constituencies and to make political arguments on a national scale. While these celebrations enabled nonvoters to participate intimately in the political process and helped dissenters forge effective means of protest, they had their limits as vehicles of democratization or modes of citizenship, Waldstreicher says. Exploring the interplay of region, race, class, and gender in the development of a national identity, he demonstrates that an acknowledgment of the diversity and conflict inherent in the process is crucial to any understanding of American politics and culture.