Early American Literature

Abstract:

This essay examines the widespread phenomenon during the early Republic of "societies of gentlemen" who edited magazines and made editorial decisions based at least in part on how a piece sounded when read aloud to one another. This collective form of editing and supporting a magazine reveals the many ways that orality and sociability were crucial to the publication, consumption, and imaginative work of periodicals in the early American Republic. Beyond the selection process at the level of publication, magazines foregrounded material that represented conversation and sociability on the page. The prevalence of representations of orality within magazines reveals the extent to which editors assumed that their readers would also be reading aloud to one another in social gatherings. Taken together, these practices suggest that magazines' much-discussed nationalistic claims about their public usefulness might invoke community, collaboration, collective literary production, and civic ties as much as they also promoted individual literary talent.