XIX. Notes on Gilbert Imlay, Early American Writer

PMLA ◽  
1924 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 406-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Farrar Emerson
Keyword(s):  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Farmer ◽  
Interesting People

In Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark (London, 1796) is a passage connecting two other interesting people, and not hitherto noticed so far as I find. It reads: This house [where she was living in Altona, a suburb of Hamburg] was particularly recommended to me by an acquaintance of your's, the author of the American Farmer's Letters. I generally dine in company with him, and the gentlemen whom I have already mentioned is often diverted by our declamations against commerce, when we compare notes respecting the characteristics of the hamburgers.1 The passage indicates not only that Mary Wollstonecraft had met in her travels the French-American Crèvecceur, the Hector St. John of the Letters of an American Farmer (1782), but that Crèvecceur and Gilbert Imlay had an acquaintanceship not hitherto suspected. This and other matters concerning Imlay seem to warrant some further notes on his life and works.

WILLIAM MANNING AND THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE DEPENDENT CLASSES

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEX GOUREVITCH
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early American ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
Republican Liberty ◽  
Modern Republicanism ◽  
American Farmer

This article reappraises the political ideas of William Manning, and through him the trajectory of early modern republicanism. Manning, an early American farmer writing in the 1780s and 1790s, developed the republican distinction between “the idle Few” and “the laboring Many” into a novel “political theory of the dependent classes.” On this theory, it is the dependent, laboring classes who share an interest in social equality. Because of this interest, they are the only ones who can achieve and maintain republican liberty. With this identification of the interests of the dependent classes with the common good, Manning inverted inherited republican ideas, and transformed the language of liberty and virtue into one of the first potent, republican critiques of exploitation. As such, he stands as a key figure for understanding the shift in early modern republicanism from a concern with constitutionalism and the rule of law to the social question.

Circulating Objects

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-48
Author(s):  
Reed Gochberg
Keyword(s):  
Museum Collections ◽  
Missing Information ◽  
Early American ◽  
Charles Willson Peale ◽  
Potential Loss ◽  
Public Museums ◽  
American Farmer ◽  
Ongoing Concern

The chapter explores how early American collections were consistently preoccupied with threats of loss and decay. It focuses on the American Philosophical Society’s cabinet, which was developed through the society’s networks of members and correspondents and included specimens, antiquarian artifacts, models, maps, and books. This chapter examines writings by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Charles Willson Peale to show how the uncertainties of attempting to build museum collections informed ongoing conversations about preservation and potential loss. By narratively experimenting with the possibilities of lost or missing information in Letters from an American Farmer and other writings, Crèvecoeur reveals ongoing concern with the longevity and survival of fragile manuscripts and printed texts. Peale similarly takes up questions of preservation, using his skill at taxidermy to promote his relationship with the Society and to link public museums to national stability.

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Evans
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
The Many

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.

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