Programs

AAS Seminar in American Bibliography and Book Trade History
Tuesday, October 3, 2000

PR�CIS: The "first" American novels appear just after the Constitutional Convention, and the timing of the novel's late rise in the United States has lent support to the argument that the nation and the novel are inextricably related. My talk will examine "literary" magazines from the early national period--focusing on those of Isaiah Thomas and Charles Brockden Brown--as a site in which authors and editors sought to articulate alternate models of constructing readerships, citizenship, and literary nationalism to those being imagined with the rise of the novel. I will argue for the need to reconceptualize the properties of these magazines--their fragmented and miscellaneous contents, their multivocality, their transatlantic borrowings, their haphazard publication schedules and histories--not as signs of the failure of the medium or of the cultural inadequacies of the new republic, as they are so often read. Instead we need to learn to read in these magazines sophisticated experiments that imagine different models of authority, community and interpretation--national and literary--for the early republic.

Refreshments will be provided during the discussion of the paper. Afterwards, a supper, with wine, will be served in the dining room of the Goddard-Daniels House at $14.00 per person. The entr‚e will be chicken piccata. If you prefer a vegetarian entr‚e, please indicate on the form below. If you wish to stay for supper, please send your check in that amount to arrive at AAS by Friday, September 29. The Society regrets that it is unable to make refunds for dinner after that date.