The past three decades have seen a surge of interest in forms of
social analysis arising out of the study of conduct and manners -
particularly among historians of early modern Europe and the
periods prior to the Age of Democratic Revolution. The essays in
this collection broaden the line of inquiry to include the American
context from the colonial period to the present. Scholars from both
the United States and Europe analyse the views of writers and
social commentators - assessing, questioning, and re-evaluating the
role of manners in American society. Should manners be seen as a
particular feature of Old World aristocratic societies that have
become obsolete in the New? Or do they continue to shape modern
democratic societies, perhaps under a different 'gestalt'? Is the
apparent absence of a sophisticated system of manners in the United
States - as many nineteenth-century novelists thought - a sign of
cultural and aesthetic impoverishment? Or does this absence signal
the emergence of a new 'natural' and 'authentic' personality? Does
the ubiquity of a relaxed or informal style in the twentieth
century signal this new freedom of self-expression? Or does it
indicate that other, more abstract disciplinary systems have
superseded the regime of manners? The essays in this volume make
clear that the discourse about American manners and civility -
which has been readily engaged by writers and social critics at
different moments in American history - was a discourse about the
forces that shape the social processes in modern democracy.
General
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