Michael P. Kramer
Imagining Language in America: From Revolution to the Civil War.
Princeton University Press, 1991. First printing. 0691068828 xix/239 pages.
Volume is bound in light green cloth, with stamped black lettering to spine. Book and dust jacket are in excellent condition. Jacket is now preserved in paper-backed mylar cover.
"In this study of the rhetoric of American writings on language, Michael Kramer argues that the prevalent critical distinction between imaginative and nonimaginative writing is of limited theoretical use. Breaking down the artificial, disciplinary barriers between two areas of scholarly inquiry -- the literature of the American Renaissance and the study of language in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War -- Kramer finds in various walks of intellectual life a broad range of writers who "imagined language" for the new experiment in self-government. Each of these men combined ideas about language with ideas about America so as to form cultural fictions,or creative renderings of the nation -- its meaning, its character, and how it worked."