The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century AmericaUniversity of Chicago Press, 15/11/2003 - 321 من الصفحات Thousands of men left their families for the bustling cities of nineteenth-century America, where many of them found work as clerks. The Clerk's Tale recounts their remarkable story, describing the struggle of aspiring businessmen to come of age at the dawn of the modern era. How did these young men understand the volatile world of American capitalism and make sense of their place within it? Thomas Augst follows clerks as they made their way through the boarding houses, parlors, and offices of the big city. Tracing the course of their everyday lives, Augst shows how these young men used acts of reading and writing to navigate the anonymous world of market culture and claim identities for themselves within it. Clerks, he reveals, calculated their prospects in diaries, composed detailed letters to friends and family, attended lectures by key thinkers of the day, joined libraries where they consumed fiction, all while wrestling with the boredom of their work. What results, then, is a poignant look at the literary practices of ordinary people and an affecting meditation on the moral lives of men in antebellum America. |
المحتوى
The Moral Economy of Literacy | 1 |
Diaries and the Moral Practice of Everyday Life | 19 |
Habit Leisure and the Domestication of Literary Taste | 62 |
Emerson in the Lecture Hall | 114 |
The New YorkMercantile Library and the Enterprise of Reading | 158 |
Professional Ethos and the Modern Literary Sphere | 207 |
Epilogue Debris from the Business of Living | 255 |
Notes | 269 |
Selected Bibliography | 305 |
| 309 | |
طبعات أخرى - عرض جميع المقتطفات
عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة
accounting acquired aesthetic American Antiquarian Society antebellum association autonomy Bartleby became become Boston Bradford Morse capital century civic clerks commonplace context conversation cultivation democratic diary discipline discourse domestic duty economic Emerson Essays ethical exercise experience feeling fiction forms Franklin gender habits Herman Melville Ibid increasingly individual institutions intellectual intimacy Jonathan Hill journal knowledge Lawrence Buell learned lecture hall letters liberal literary leisure literary practices literary taste literature lives managers market culture mass Max Weber Melville’s middle-class mind modern moral authority Morse narrator nature New-York Historical Society nineteenth nineteenth-century America norms novels numbers NYMLAAR one’s philosophy Piazza Tales popular printed professional Public Library Ralph Waldo Emerson rational readers reading and writing rhetorical Scrivener sentimental skills social spiritual Stanley Cavell story suggests Thomas Mellon thought tion tradition ture University of Chicago University Press white-collar women York Mercantile Library young