Enfilade

From the American Antiquarian Society:

Encountering Revolution: Print Culture, Politics, and the British American Loyalists
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, 13-17 June 2011

Applications due by 11 March 2011

What happens to the dominant critical models in Revolutionary history-those that govern the way we conceptualize the meanings of print, the nature of authorship, the rhetorical forms of expression, and the very notion of “public” culture-when we reinsert the Loyalist presence into Revolutionary American Studies? The 2011 AAS Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in American Culture will employ transatlantic methods and contexts as a way of challenging the field’s reliance on nationalist models of literary and cultural history that rest upon the political history of the formation and development of the United States. This seminar will interrogate the “Americanness” of American political writing to articulate generic and thematic continuities between British and British American writing and printing.  By accounting for Loyalist writing in a revisionary history of Revolutionary print culture-through an examination of Loyalist printers and distribution networks as well as of efforts to censor Loyalist publications-we also hope the seminar will interrogate current models of the “public sphere” and of the historical/theoretical models informing public and private life in late eighteenth-century British America. Our goal is to consider the multiple, transatlantic audiences that Loyalist writing imagines for itself-and the larger issues about British American identity and identification that such imagined communities of readers raise for us today. The seminar will be led by Philip Gould (Professor of English, Brown University) and Ed Larkin (Associate Professor of English, University of Delaware). Details about the seminar and application forms are available at the AAS website. Limited amounts of financial aid are available for graduate student applicants.