Understanding the presidency of the United States requires taking seriously the role that individuals play in history, but at the same time also taking seriously the realization that individual presidents are bound by legal and institutional structures as well as by cultural and economic forces often beyond their control. This is why the task of this book is to characterize the modern American presidency from a variety of academic disciplines such as history, political science and cultural studies as well as from different theoretical approaches. The essays collected in this volume grew out of conference papers held at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), which was held in Heidelberg between May 15 and 18, 2008. Many essays are deliberately interpretive, some offer assessments of individual presidents and of particular events, others are more contextual and focus on presidential performance, on presidential rhetoric or on representations of the presidency in fiction, film and drama.

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 Or does it indicate that other, more abstract disciplinary systems have superseded the regime of manners?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.

Die Literatur der amerikanischen Grunderzeit galt lange Zeit als epigonal. Seit die historische Forschung (B. Bailyn, G. S. Wood, J. G. A. Pocock) in der amerikanischen Revolution ebenfalls ruckwartsgewandte, anti- modernistische Impulse nachgewiesen hat, erscheint der vermeintliche Anachronismus der Literatur in einem neuen Licht. Die Arbeit zeigt die enge Verflechtung zwischen den politischen und literarischen Diskursen in der fruhen Republik. Die Schriftsteller und Dichter machten sich die von der Politik propagierte Vision einer amerikanischen Tugendrepublik zu eigen und stellten ihre Werke in den Dienst der republikanischen Erziehung. Dabei diente der Topos von der tugendhaften Republik keineswegs nur konservativen Zwecken, sondern fungierte eine Zeit lang als zentrale Ideenmatrix fur die Erprobung neuer politischer Positionen. Die hier vorgelegten Analysen der 'Visionsgedichte' der Connecticut Wits, der sentimentalen Frauenromane und der Essays und Romane von Charles Brockden Brown machen deutlich, wie mit Hilfe dieser Denkfigur liberale, feministische, ja sogar anarchistische Inhalte transportiert werden konnten.