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Republic of Taste : Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America / Catherine E. Kelly.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Early American StudiesPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2016]Copyright date: ©2016Description: 1 online resource (312 p.) : 11 color, 38 b/w illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812248234
  • 9780812292954
Subject(s): LOC classification:
  • E162 .K32 2016eb
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. The American Republic of Taste -- Chapter One. Learning Taste -- Chapter Two. Aesthetic Entrepreneurs -- Chapter Three. Picturing Race -- Chapter Four. Looking Past Loyalism -- Chapter Five. Waxing Political -- Chapter Six. Political Personae -- Epilogue. The Nation's Guest in the Republic of Taste -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments
Summary: Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate-and therefore a marker of breeding and station-or acquired-and thus the product of application and study-all could appreciate that taste was grounded in, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking. It was widely believed that shared aesthetic sensibilities connected like-minded individuals and that shared affinities advanced the public good and held great promise for the American republic.Exploring the intersection of the early republic's material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Catherine E. Kelly demonstrates how American thinkers acknowledged the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Judgments about art, architecture, literature, poetry, and the theater became an arena for considering political issues ranging from government structures and legislative representation to qualifications for citizenship and the meaning of liberty itself. Additionally, if taste prompted political debate, it also encouraged affinity grounded in a shared national identity. In the years following independence, ordinary women and men reassured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual's character and potential for republican citizenship.Did an early national vocabulary of taste, then, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780812292954

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. The American Republic of Taste -- Chapter One. Learning Taste -- Chapter Two. Aesthetic Entrepreneurs -- Chapter Three. Picturing Race -- Chapter Four. Looking Past Loyalism -- Chapter Five. Waxing Political -- Chapter Six. Political Personae -- Epilogue. The Nation's Guest in the Republic of Taste -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate-and therefore a marker of breeding and station-or acquired-and thus the product of application and study-all could appreciate that taste was grounded in, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking. It was widely believed that shared aesthetic sensibilities connected like-minded individuals and that shared affinities advanced the public good and held great promise for the American republic.Exploring the intersection of the early republic's material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Catherine E. Kelly demonstrates how American thinkers acknowledged the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Judgments about art, architecture, literature, poetry, and the theater became an arena for considering political issues ranging from government structures and legislative representation to qualifications for citizenship and the meaning of liberty itself. Additionally, if taste prompted political debate, it also encouraged affinity grounded in a shared national identity. In the years following independence, ordinary women and men reassured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual's character and potential for republican citizenship.Did an early national vocabulary of taste, then, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)