Prohibition and parties: Temperance in American literature and culture, 1784--1855.

详细信息   

• 作者：Miller ; Jon Stephen.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2000
• 导师：Lutz, Tom
• 毕业院校：The University of Iowa
• 专业：History, United States.;Literature, American.
• ISBN：9780599812802
• CBH：9975661
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：9051868
• Pages：266

文摘

"Prohibition and Parties" describes a literary history of the American temperance movement by attending not just to the history of temperate drinking but also to the ways that temperance is fundamental to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moral, political, and literary culture. "Prohibition and Parties" avoids ahistorical genre classifications to approach different forms of temperance literature on their own terms. This means, among other things, that in addition to works of fiction and poetry, it examines essays, tracts, reports, sermons, lectures, histories, schoolbooks, and medical treatises.;The first essay, "The Federalists," describes the temperance literature of republican federalists such as Benjamin Rush and partisan Federalists such as Fisher Ames and Joseph Dennie. With an examination of the Whiskey Rebellion, it argues that attitudes towards alcohol fueled and articulated party division from the founding of the republic. Since the 1770s, discussions of temperance have been a fundamental part of American political discourse.;The second essay, "The Schoolteachers," describes the temperance writings of the women and men who first democratized temperance, arguing that a profound respect for the necessity of temperance motivated the major educational reforms of the early nineteenth-century. It specifically addresses the writings of Emma Willard, Lydia Sigourney, and Horace Mann. It also provides a social and political context that explains the great appeal of the conventional, didactic literary style that persuasively advocated temperance.;The third and fourth essays, "The Water Poets" and "The Loafers," show the wide reach of temperance thinking into a series of a high literary texts never considered in studies of temperance literature. Set in the context of antebellum sanitary reform, "The Water Poets" credits temperance reform for the literature of political self-reliance represented by William Cullen Bryant and Ralph Waldo Emerson. "The Loafers" looks at a literary subculture that, at first glance, is the farthest cry from the pious, schoolmarmish image typically associated with temperance. In fact, the literary loafers of the antebellum decades were the literary champions of the period's most Democratic temperance movement, the Washingtonian temperance movement. Literary loaferism culminated in the composition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.