Kramer Imagining Language in America

From the Revolution to the Civil War
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6226-9
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 260 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Legacy Library

In this study of the rhetoric of American writings on language, Michael Kramer argues that the prevalent critical distinction between imaginative and nonimaginative writing is of limited theoretical use. Breaking down the artificial, disciplinary barriers between two areas of scholarly inquiry--the literature of the American Renaissance and the study of language in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War--Kramer finds in various walks of intellectual life a broad range of writers who "imagined language" for the new experiment in self-government. Each of these men combined ideas about language with ideas about America so as to form cultural fictions, or creative renderings of the nation--its meaning, its character, and how it worked. In order to reassess American linguistic and literary nationalism, Kramer allows Noah Webster, whose influential grammatical and lexicographic works have been considered only marginal to literary history, to share the stage with more conventionally literary figures--the neglected Longfellow and the canonical Whitman. Then an essay on The Federalist and the pragmatic language-related problems faced by the founding fathers introduces revisionary analyses of two New England writers who confronted American culture and society through their Romantic critiques of language: the minister and theologian Horace Bushnell and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Originally published in 1991.

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Autoren/Hrsg.

Kramer, Michael P.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

FrontMatter, pg. i
Contents, pg. vii
Preface, pg. ix
Acknowledgments, pg. xv
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works, pg. xvii
Introduction: The Study of Language and the American Renaissance, pg. 1
Chapter One. “NOW is the Time, and This is the Country”: How Noah Webster Invented American English, pg. 35
Chapter Two. “A Fine Ambiguity”: Longfellow, Language, and Literary History, pg. 64
Chapter Three. “A Tongue According”: Whitman and the Literature of Language Study, pg. 90
Chapter Four. Consensus through Ambiguity: Why Language Matters to The Federalist, pg. 119
Chapter Five. Language in a “Christian Commonwealth”: Horace Bushnell’s Cultural Criticism, pg. 137
Chapter Six. Beyond Symbolism: Philosophy of Language in The Scarlet Letter, pg. 162
Conclusion: From Logocracy to Renaissance, pg. 198
Notes, pg. 203
Index, pg. 235