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Chargement... Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literaturepar Bryan Waterman
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In the 1790s, a single conversational circle—the Friendly Club—united New York City's most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect, Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club's intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place—the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City. More than any similar group in the early American republic, the Friendly Club occupied a crossroads—geographical, professional, and otherwise—of American literary and intellectual culture. Waterman argues that the relationships among club members' novels, plays, poetry, diaries, legal writing, and medical essays lead to important first examples of a distinctively American literature and also illuminate the local, national, and transatlantic circuits of influence and information that club members called "the republic of intellect." He addresses topics ranging from political conspiracy in the gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown to the opening of William Dunlap's Park Theatre, from early American debates on gendered conversation to the publication of the first American medical journal. Voluntary association and print culture helped these young New Yorkers, Waterman concludes, to produce a broader and more diverse post-revolutionary public sphere than scholars have yet recognized. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)974.7History and Geography North America Northeastern U.S. New YorkClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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In the Friendly Club - a group of approximately ten young professional men who met regularly for conversation and debate in 1790s New York - Waterman finds a fascinating and useful framework for, as he puts it, "understanding the relationships between literary and intellectual cultures" (pg. 6). The Club's members - including Charles Brockden Brown, Elihu Hubbard Smith, William Dunlap, James Kent and others - found themselves at "the generic, geographical, and professional crossroads of American society and at the primary point of entry and exit for transmissions within a transatlantic intellectual culture" (pg. 13).
Waterman's chapters cover much ground, including the great debate over the perceived "Illuminati conspiracy" in the late 1790s, the American reception of the works of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the role of mixed-sex society and conversation, and the impact of yellow fever epidemics on the Friendly Club's membership and products. I found the Illuminati and Godwin chapters most compelling, but was quite struck overall by Waterman's readings of Charles Brockden Brown's fiction in light of his associations with his fellow Club members: his novels seem more easily explained when these considerations are taken into account.
The Friendly Club offers us something important as well, I think: moderate in politics and skeptical of religious authority and intrusiveness, the Club's members sought to transcend partisan considerations in favor of positive intellectual conversation and the progressive spread of knowledge - an ideal which remains unreached.
Aside from a bit too much literary criticism jargon in some spots, this book is excellent. The extensive and often illuminating endnotes were very useful, and I gleaned about fifteen titles which I've added to my always-growing list of things to read. Those include the edited diaries of two Friendly Club members, E.H. Smith and William Dunlap, and a few novels of Charles Brockden Brown that I wasn't aware of before.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in early American print culture, the late Enlightenment, or literary networks.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/08/book-review-republic-of-intellect.html ( )