Moral enterprise : literature and education in antebellum America / Derek Pacheco.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pacheco, Derek Andrew, 1976-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fuller, Margaret, 1810-1850.

Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 1804-1894.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864.

Mann, Horace, 1796-1859.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Popular education--New England--History--19th century.

Popular education.

Literature and society--New England--History--19th century.

Literature and society.

Mann, Horace, 1796-1859--Criticism and interpretation.

Mann, Horace.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864--Criticism and interpretation.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.

Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 1804-1894--Criticism and interpretation.

Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer.

Fuller, Margaret, 1810-1850--Criticism and interpretation.

Fuller, Margaret.

Criticism and interpretation.

History.

New England.

Physical Description:

x, 202 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbus : Ohio State University Press, [2013]

Summary:

Moral Enterprise: Literature and Education in Antebellum America, by Derek Pacheco, investigates an important moment in the history of professional authorship. Pacheco uses New England "literary reformers" Horace Mann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Peabody, and Margaret Fuller to argue that writers came to see in educational reform, and the publication venues emerging in connection with it, a means to encourage popular authorship while validating literary work as a profession. Although today's schools are staffed by systematically trained and institutionally sanctioned teachers, in the unregulated, decentralized world of antebellum America, literary men and women sought the financial stability of teaching while claiming it as moral grounds for the pursuit of greater literary fame. Examining the ethically redemptive and potentially lucrative definition of antebellum author as educator, this book traces the way these literary reformers aimed hot merely at social reform through literature but also at the reform of literature itself by employing a wide array of practices-authoring, editing, publishing, and distributing printed texts-brought together under the aegis of modern, democratic education. Moral Enterprise identifies such endeavors by their dual valence as bold, reformist undertakings and economic ventures, exploring literary texts as educational commodities that might act as entry points into, and ways to tame, what Mann characterized as the "Alexandrian library" of American print culture. Book jacket.

Contents:

Education and the "Alexandrian library"

Bibliographic nationalism : marketing America in Horace Mann's school library

"Disorders of the circulating medium" : Hawthorne's early children's literature

"Contact with the world" : Elizabeth Peabody's West Street bookshop

"Conversation of a better order" : Margaret Fuller from the classroom to the dial

Coda. "The sun is but a morning star".

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-193) and index.

ISBN:

9780814212387

0814212387

9780814293409

0814293409

OCLC:

838793023