Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders“Everyday Ideas is extraordinary in the breadth and depth of the research on which it is founded. While other scholars have discussed reading behavior in numerous specialized studies, there are only a few scholars whose work is as broad as Zborays’. This [book] is more ambitious than most, and will be a landmark study because it is both a synthesis based on secondary scholarship and a fresh inquiry that relies on a multitude of primary sources.” Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders takes an unprecedented look at the use of literature in everyday life in one of history’s most literate societies-the home ground of the American Renaissance. Using information pulled from four thousand manuscript letters and diaries, Everyday Ideas provides a comprehensive picture of how the social and literary dimensions of human existence related in antebellum New England. Penned by ordinary people-factory workers, farmers, clerks, storekeepers, domestics, and teachers and other professionals-the writings examined here brim with thoughtful references to published texts, lectures, and speeches by the period’s canonized authors and lesser lights. These personal accounts also give an insider’s perspective on issues ranging from economic problems, to social status conflicts, to being separated from loved ones by region, state, or nation. Everyday Ideas examines such references and accounts and interprets the multiple ways literature figured into the lives of these New Englanders. An important aid in understanding historical readers and social authorship practices, Everyday Ideas is a unique resource on New England and provides a framework for understanding the profound role of ideas in the everyday world of the antebellum period. Ronald and Mary Zboray are the authors of A Handbook for the Study of Book History in the United States and Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book. They have written articles for Journalism History, American Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, Libraries and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and American Studies. |
Contents
Writing within Genre Conventions | |
The Civil War and the Fate of Socioliterary | |
Dissemination | |
Presenting and Receiving Literary Gifts | |
Lending and Borrowing Reading Material | |
Literary Socialization and Modes of Readings | |
Finding Time to Read | |
Receiving Public Lectures and Readings | |
Reception of Books and Periodicals as Objects | |
Everyday Reception of the Printed | |
Notes | |
Works Cited | |