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Patricia Crain - The Story of A. The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter.  - 9780804731744 - V9780804731744
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The Story of A. The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter.

€ 167.50
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Description for The Story of A. The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter. Hardback. Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance. Num Pages: 336 pages, 19 line diagrams 52 half-tones. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 2ABM; CF; DSB. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 4852 x 3887 x 26. Weight in Grams: 509.

Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance.

Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as "A is for apple." The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for the "republic of ABC" a cultural potency equivalent to ... Read more

In the nineteenth century, literacy became a crucial aspect of American middle-class personality and subjectivity. Furnishing the readers and writers needed for a national literature, the alphabetization of America between 1800 and 1850 informed the sentimental-reform novel as well as the self-consciously aesthetic novel of the 1850s. Through readings of conduct manuals, reading primers, and a sentimental bestseller, the author shows how the alphabet became embedded in a maternal narrative, which organized the world through domestic affections.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, insisted on the artificiality of the alphabet and its practices in his antimimetic, hermetic The Scarlet Letter, with its insistent focus on the letter A. By understanding this novel as part of the network of alphabetization, The Story of A accounts for its uniquely persistent cultural role. The author concludes, in an epilogue, with a reading of postmodern alphabets and their implications for the future of literacy.

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Product Details

Format
Hardback
Publication date
2000
Publisher
Stanford University Press United States
Number of pages
336
Condition
New
Number of Pages
336
Place of Publication
Palo Alto, United States
ISBN
9780804731744
SKU
V9780804731744
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15

About Patricia Crain
Patricia Crain is Associate Professor of English at New York University.

Reviews for The Story of A. The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter.
"Imaginatively conceived, elegantly written, The Story of A is one of the most original works I have read in recent years. Through her insightful, witty account of alphabetization in America, Crain detects shifting views of childhood, women, the family, and the relations between the individual and society, thus illuminating central questions in social and cultural history. The Story of A ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for The Story of A. The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter.


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