Civil tongues & polite letters in British America / David S. Shields.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Chapter 1: Overture -- The Promise of Civil Discourse -- Chapter 2: Belles Lettres and the Arenas of Metropolitan Conversation -- A Conversation in the Suburbs -- Politeness and Wit -- The Model of Belles Lettres -- Sociability -- Gentility and Taste -- The Spas and the Sexes -- The Profanations of Grub Street -- Chapter 3: Coffeehouse and Tavern -- Henry Brooke -- The Poet as Agent of Urbanity -- Tavern Talk Transfigured -- Beyond Politeness -- Chapter 4: Tea Tables and Salons -- Tea and Sympathy -- The Garden of Sensibility -- Chapter 5: Rites of Assembly -- At the Ball -- Card Games and the Muse -- The Sphinx's Challenge -- Crambo -- The Contest of Wit -- Chapter 6: The Clubs -- The Brotherhood of Fish -- The Practice of Good Fellowship -- Chapter 7: The College, the Press, and the Public -- Elegy and the College Cult of Memory -- The Religious Sublime -- The Polite Christian -- Famous Characters and the Defamer -- The Duplicities of Print -- Old Janus -- Chapter 8: Gaining Admission -- The Rapid Rise of Dr. Dale -- An Anatomy of Hospitality -- Chapter 9: Toward the Polite Republic.

In urban areas from Boston to Charleston, the elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in a variety of private venues to communicate and interact. David Shields looks into the taverns, tea rooms, salons, coffee houses, card parties, clubs, and fraternities where these displays of civility took place. He argues that such spaces, formed outside the domain of the state, became key sites for elite discursive formation, for the articulation and enactment of the values of civility. In an important reinterpretation of early American literary history, he argues that the belles lettres generated for and within these institutions in fact represent a powerful colonial genre involving experimentation with manners and social identities. By examining the language and forms of various "texts"--Including conversations, letters, privately circulated manuscripts, and other forms of expression - he reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America

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