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

About this book

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.