Republic Of Letters

By tracing the rise of a national intellectual elite to the conditions presented by the American Revolution, to the nature of eighteenth-century educational institutions, and the reading that was available in those institutions, Ostrander shows how and why literary elites were constituted, and what their relationship was to the power structures of that world. He also examines the attempts of these elites to form institutions patterned after European models at the same time forge new institutions characteristic of their new nation. Republic of Letters is a sweeping account of this literary class in the United States, the serious writers and readers from Independence to the Civil War.