Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776 1865

Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776 1865

Gustafson, Thomas

Paperback

Series: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Book 60

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 052106564X
ISBN13: 9780521065641
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: Jun 19 2008
Pages: 488
Weight: 1.56
Height: 1.09 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Ralph Waldo Emerson's dictum--The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language--belongs to a long tradition of writing, connecting political disorders and the corruption of language, that stretches back in Western culture. Representative Words, which gives an account of the tradition from its classical and Christian origins through the Enlightenment, is primarily a study of how and why Americans renewed and developed it between the ages of the Revolutionary and the Civil Wars. It is the first comprehensive treatment of the background to and the appearance of the wealth of theories about language in the early era of American political and cultural discourse. Professor Gustafson's argument demonstrates the interconnectedness of the state of language and the state of society and turns on the question of representation and misrepresentation--whether and how words represent or misrepresent nature, social reality, truth, and value in the new American experiment in representative republican government.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All