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Conversing with books: reading the eighteenth-century British periodical essay in Jeffersonian America

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Title
Conversing with books: reading the eighteenth-century British periodical essay in Jeffersonian America
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Title
Reading the eighteenth-century British periodical essay in Jeffersonian America
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Squibbs
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Richard J.
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Richard J. Squibbs
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Dowling
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William
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William C Dowling
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William
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William Galperin
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Myra Jehlen
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Potkay
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Adam
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Adam Potkay
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Rutgers University
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Graduate School - New Brunswick
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theses
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2007
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2007
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English
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electronic
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v, 287 pages
Abstract
The periodical essay is the sole British literary genre to have emerged and declined within the chronological eighteenth century. It appeared in London during the reign of Queen Anne, and by the end of the century had virtually disappeared amidst a new culture of magazine publication. This study charts the various guises the genre assumed across the eighteenth century as essayists in Edinburgh, Philadelphia and Manhattan adapted the worldviews expressed in the earlier London essays to the particular circumstances of their cities. What the English essayists and their readers had regarded as timely, topical conversations in print about manners and culture became something more to their Scottish and American avatars. The periodical essay for them became a medium for witnessing historical change, a genre centrally concerned with what might have been.
Each of the first three chapters focuses on a particular figure within the periodical essay tradition, showing how each one articulates a moral relationship to civil society that the essays' authors encourage their readers to adopt. The Censor in chapter one represents a certain manner of reading, one that means to prompt social self-reflection in the name of a broader, more comprehensive civic awareness. Chapter two takes the whimsical essayistic persona as its subject, reading whimsicality as a principled resistance to the rationalizations of time management in a developing market society, and as a direct challenge to the herd mentality periodical writers see as the real face of liberal individualism in its consumer-market guise. My third chapter shows how the Templar, a young law student who finds himself drawn increasingly to literature, comes to figure in Scottish and American essay series a perception that belletristic writing must assume a law-like moral function in recording for posterity these writers' exemplary resistance to civic decline. My final chapter then reads Washington Irving's History of New York as self-consciously drawing upon these elements of the periodical tradition to create a sort of literary conscience for a new American polity seemingly intent on reducing all of civic life to an imaginatively impoverished market for consumer goods.
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 266-286).
Subject (ID = SUBJ1); (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Literatures in English
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English essays--18th century--History and criticism
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Graduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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rucore19991600001
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http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.16781
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ETD_362
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Identifier (type = doi)
doi:10.7282/T3T43TG8
Genre (authority = ExL-Esploro)
ETD doctoral
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The author owns the copyright to this work.
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Open
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Richard Squibbs
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Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.
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