The Friendly Club of New York City: Industries of knowledge in the early republic
详细信息
- 作者：Waterman ; Bryan Elliot
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2000
- 关键词：Social sciences ; Language ; literature and linguistic
- 导师：Mizruchi,Susan L
- 毕业院校：Boston University
- 专业：American studies;American literature;American history
- ISBN：9780599702622,0599702621
- CBH：9965664
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：13365308
- Pages：275
文摘
This dissertation examines an urban intellectual circle of upwardly mobile young men at the end of the eighteenth century. While American literary and cultural historians have long recognized the importance of intellectual association in the emergence of early national literature,few studies have actually explored specific networks with any rigor. Critics have acknowledged the Friendly Club's place in early American literary culture--particularly through its influence on club member Charles Brockden Brown--but little archival and textual study has been undertaken of the group as a whole. As a relatively ordinary and experimental yet highly productive and influential "republic of intellect," the Friendly Club allows us to see in process the literary methods,philosophical ideas,and political practices generated by Enlightenment ideals in America. The study illuminates the construction of vocational identities by young men who helped lay the cornerstones of the main professions of American thought,from legal theory,medicine,and economics,to natural history and literary authorship (poetic,dramatic,and novelistic). At its height the club included Elihu Hubbard Smith,Charles Brockden Brown,William Dunlap,James Kent,William Johnson,Samuel Latham Mitchill,Edward and Samuel Miller,and William and George Woolsey--all recognized well into the nineteenth century as key founders of their respective fields. Focusing attention primarily on Elihu Smith's diary,James Kent's legal writing,William Dunlap's Park Theatre,and the yellow fever epidemics that served as catalyst for both the Medical Repository (the first American medical journal,co-edited by Smith,Mitchill,and Edward Miller) and Charles Brockden Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn,this dissertation explores ways in which the group's diversity embodied the profuse tensions of the American 1790s--between Federalism and Republicanism,deism and Christianity,fraternalism and women's rights,print and oratory,disciplinary and general knowledge,utilitarianism and liberal individualism,private association and an increasingly heterogeneous public sphere. Situated on the cusp between the wide-ranging hybridity of Enlightenment knowledges and the early consolidation of discrete disciplines that would continue through the nineteenth century,the dissertation offers a more complex portrait than previously available of the roles played by writing and intellectual association in the formation of modern professional identities.