Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America

"Here is literary history that in an exemplary manner links the history of taste and aesthetics with the social history of literary production. "David D. Hall, Harvard UniversityThe discourse of civility in British America's taverns, tea rooms, salons, coffee houses, card parties, clubs, and fraternitiesIn cities from Boston to Charleston, elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in private venues to script a polite culture, By examining their various "texts" -- conversations, letters, newspapers, and privately circulated manuscripts -- David Shields reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America."In this wonderful book, David Shields brilliantly recovers the disappeared world of eighteenth-century belle lettres as a set of socially situated performances taking place at coffeehouses, private societies, literary salons, clubs, colleges, balls, and gaming tables. Whether poetry or prose, these circulated texts, written not for posterity but as group communications, served to display wit, to create shared pleasure, and to preserve genteel society. Shields's Civil Tongues and Polite Letters permanently changes our understanding of eighteenth-century literary history and offers a powerful account of the fate of social pleasure in American culture". -- Jay Fliegelman, Stanford University