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The Clerk's Tale : Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America - Thomas Augst

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The Clerk's Tale

Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America

By: Thomas Augst

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Paperback | 15 November 2003 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
328 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.28 x 1.52 x 0.2

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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.

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List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: The Moral Economy of Literacy	p. 1
Accounting for Character: Diaries and the Moral Practice of Everyday Life	p. 19
The Coin of Character	p. 24
Memory and the Commonplace Tradition	p. 33
Self-Examination and the Devotions of Literacy	p. 41
Time Is Money: The Value of the Future	p. 48
Equality of Aspiration	p. 55
Forms of Feeling: Habit, Leisure, and the Domestication of Literary Taste	p. 62
The Drill of Nature	p. 66
Letters and the Debts of Family	p. 71
The Profit of Pleasure	p. 79
The Art of Conversation	p. 93
Sentimental Pathos and the Conventions of Intimacy	p. 104
Popular Philosophy and Democratic Voice: Emerson in the Lecture Hall	p. 114
Becoming Whole: The Struggle for Composure	p. 120
Modes of Civic Education	p. 128
The Eloquence of Moral Life	p. 144
Making Society out of Books: The New York Mercantile Library and the Enterprise of Reading	p. 158
Circulating Libraries and the Business of Books	p. 164
Reading and Breeding for the Profession	p. 175
The Liberty of Intellect and the Taste for Fiction	p. 191
The Melancholy of White-Collar Work: Professional Ethos and the Modern Literary Sphere	p. 207
The Blank Page and the Place of Writing	p. 209
The Credit of Character, in Parts and Whole	p. 219
Professional Authorship and the Literary Sphere	p. 232
Epilogue: Debris from the Business of Living	p. 255
Notes	p. 269
Selected Bibliography	p. 305
Index	p. 309
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

The Clerk's Tale

Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America

At a Glance

Paperback

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How to return your order

Defective items

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