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This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It
contains classical literature works from over two thousand years.
Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore
shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the
cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical
literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the
mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from
oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of
international literature classics available in printed format again
- worldwide.
First published in England in 1782, Crevecoeur's Letters from an
American Farmer was one of the first works to describe the
character of the average American at the close of the Revolutionary
War. His famous question, "What, then, is the American, this new
man?," summarized the European's interest in and questioning of the
new country of America at a time when centuries of tradition had
just been overturned and post-colonial Americans were attempting to
describe themselves in a new way. Through the character of James,
the letters celebrate the land of America, its space and fertility,
and the character of Americans themselves, their work ethic and
spirit of personal determination. The Letters also look at the
darker side of American life, particularly the issue of slavery.
The discussions of American identity, participation in war (or
not), and the perception of immigrants and their ethnicity make
this book as relevant to our understanding of ourselves today as it
was in 1782.
This is a critical edition of the essays that J. Hector St. John de
Crevecoeur (1735-1813) wrote in English but did not include in
Letters from an American Farmer. First published in 1782, Letters
from an American Farmer is an eighteenth-century cultural
masterpiece. Written in English by a French-born immigrant, it is a
collection of semiautobiographical writings in epistolary form that
describe daily life along the northern frontier during the days
leading up to the American Revolution. Conveying the attitudes,
beliefs, aspirations, and conflicting loyalties of common settlers,
Letters has helped subsequent generations to grasp the ethos of a
nascent America. More than a century after Crevecoeur's death,
three bound manuscript volumes surfaced that included not only the
original handwritten texts of most of Letters but also the
twenty-two similar writings that now make up More Letters from the
American Farmer. Those manuscript volumes are now housed in the
Library of Congress. Five of the pieces in More Letters are
previously unpublished; the others were first published in 1925-26
but were so inconsistently and arbitrarily edited as to
misrepresent the author. This edition has been awarded the emblem
of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly
Editions. It is based on an examination of all available relevant
textual sources and includes extensive textual and historical
contextual information. Rather than modernizing Crevecoeur's
capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, Dennis D. Moore has
preserved the original texts as closely as possible. Thus, More
Letters marks the first appearance of these twenty-two writings as
Crevecoeur composed them. In his general introduction, Moore
discusses the various personae through which Crevecoeur speaks in
these essays and notes the stylistic and topical similarities and
variations between these writings and those collected in Letters.
Pointing to Crevecoeur's evident influences and interests, Moore
discusses recurrent themes and images related to medicine, law,
religion, classicism, enlightenment philosophy, nationalism,
agrarianism, aggression and war, and the cults of sensibility and
domesticity. Revising and expanding what we thought we knew about
Crevecoeur and his lifelong absorption in America and Americanness,
More Letters also makes a significant contribution to the study of
early American culture.
This book is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical
literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles
have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades.
The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to
promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a
TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the
amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series,
tredition intends to make thousands of international literature
classics available in printed format again - worldwide.
Letters from an American Farmer was published in London in 1782,
just as the idea of an "American" was becoming a reality. Those
epistolary essays introduced the European public to America's
landscape and customs and have since served as the iconic
description of a then-new people. Dennis D. Moore's convenient,
up-to-date reader's edition situates those twelve pieces from the
1782 Letters in the context of thirteen other essays representative
of Crevecoeur's writings in English. The "American Farmer" of the
title is Crevecoeur's fictional persona Farmer James, a bumpkin
from rural Pennsylvania. In his Introduction to this edition, Moore
places this self-effacing pose in perspective and charts
Crevecoeur's enterprising approach to self-promotion, which
involved repackaging and adapting his writings for French and
English audiences. Born in Normandy, Crevecoeur came to New York in
the 1750s by way of England and then Canada, traveled throughout
the colonies as a surveyor and trader, and was naturalized in 1765.
The pieces he included in the 1782 Letters map a shift from
hopefulness to disillusionment: its opening selections offer
America as a utopian haven from European restrictions on personal
liberty and material advancement but give way to portrayals of a
land plagued by the horrors of slavery, the threat of Indian raids,
and revolutionary unrest. This new edition opens up a broader
perspective on this artful, ambitious writer and cosmopolitan
thinker who coined America's most enduring metaphor: a place where
"individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men."
Who would have thought that because I received you with hospitality
and kindness, you should imagine me capable of writing with
propriety and perspicuity? Your gratitude misleads your judgment.
The knowledge which I acquired from your conversation has amply
repaid me for your five weeks' entertainment. I gave you nothing
more than what common hospitality dictated; but could any other
guest have instructed me as you did?
Who would have thought that because I received you with hospitality
and kindness, you should imagine me capable of writing with
propriety and perspicuity? Your gratitude misleads your judgment.
The knowledge which I acquired from your conversation has amply
repaid me for your five weeks' entertainment. I gave you nothing
more than what common hospitality dictated; but could any other
guest have instructed me as you did?
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly
growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by
advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve
the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own:
digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works
in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these
high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts
are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries,
undergraduate students, and independent scholars.Delve into what it
was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the
first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and
farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists
and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original
texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly
contemporary.++++The below data was compiled from various
identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title.
This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure
edition identification: ++++<sourceLibrary>Library of
Congress<ESTCID>W013544<Notes>Dedicated to the abbe
Raynal. Error in paging: p. 43 misnumbered 34. A variant has p.43
correctly numbered.<imprintFull>Philadelphia: From the press
of Mathew Carey, March 4, --MDCCXCIII. 1793].
<collation>viii, 1], 10-240 p.; 12
This Book Is In French. Due to the very old age and scarcity of
this book, many of the pages may be hard to read due to the
blurring of the original text.
First published in England in 1782, Crevecoeur's Letters from an
American Farmer was one of the first works to describe the
character of the average American at the close of the Revolutionary
War. His famous question, "What, then, is the American, this new
man?," summarized the European's interest in and questioning of the
new country of America at a time when centuries of tradition had
just been overturned and post-colonial Americans were attempting to
describe themselves in a new way. Through the character of James,
the letters celebrate the land of America, its space and fertility,
and the character of Americans themselves, their work ethic and
spirit of personal determination. The Letters also look at the
darker side of American life, particularly the issue of slavery.
The discussions of American identity, participation in war (or
not), and the perception of immigrants and their ethnicity make
this book as relevant to our understanding of ourselves today as it
was in 1782.
Who would have thought that because I received you with hospitality
and kindness, you should imagine me capable of writing with
propriety and perspicuity? Your gratitude misleads your judgment.
The knowledge which I acquired from your conversation has amply
repaid me for your five weeks' entertainment. I gave you nothing
more than what common hospitality dictated; but could any other
guest have instructed me as you did?
This is a critical edition of the essays that J. Hector St. John de
Crevecoeur (1735-1813) wrote in English but did not include in
Letters from an American Farmer. First published in 1782, Letters
from an American Farmer is an eighteenth-century cultural
masterpiece. Written in English by a French-born immigrant, it is a
collection of semiautobiographical writings in epistolary form that
describe daily life along the northern frontier during the days
leading up to the American Revolution. Conveying the attitudes,
beliefs, aspirations, and conflicting loyalties of common settlers,
Letters has helped subsequent generations to grasp the ethos of a
nascent America. More than a century after Crevecoeur's death,
three bound manuscript volumes surfaced that included not only the
original handwritten texts of most of Letters but also the
twenty-two similar writings that now make up More Letters from the
American Farmer. Those manuscript volumes are now housed in the
Library of Congress. Five of the pieces in More Letters are
previously unpublished; the others were first published in 1925-26
but were so inconsistently and arbitrarily edited as to
misrepresent the author. This edition has been awarded the emblem
of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly
Editions. It is based on an examination of all available relevant
textual sources and includes extensive textual and historical
contextual information. Rather than modernizing Crevecoeur's
capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, Dennis D. Moore has
preserved the original texts as closely as possible. Thus, More
Letters marks the first appearance of these twenty two writings as
Crevecoeur composed them. In his generalintroduction, Moore
discusses the various personae through which Crevecoeur speaks in
these essays and notes the stylistic and topical similarities and
variations between these writings and those collected in Letters.
Pointing to Crevecoeur's evident influences and interests, Moore
discusses recurrent themes and images related to medicine, law,
religion, classicism, enlightenment philosophy, nationalism,
agrarianism, aggression and war, and the cults of sensibility and
domesticity. Revising and expanding what we thought we knew about
Crevecoeur and his lifelong absorption in America and Americanness,
More Letters also makes a significant contribution to the study of
early American culture.
`to the European, the American is first and foremost a
dollar-fiend. We tend to forget the emotional heritage of Hector St
John de Crevecoeur' When D.H. Lawrence made this statement in his
Studies in Classic American Literature, he was thinking of the
Letters from an American Farmer. First published in England in
1782, the Letters came at a timely moment as attention was focused
on America in the closing year of the Revolutionary War of
Independence. Crevecoeur's famous question `What, then, is the
American, this new man?' was a matter of great interest, as it
became evident that America, that new nation, was taking shape
before the eyes of the world. Some of American literature's most
pressing and recurrent concerns are adumbrated in the substance and
style of the Letters: in addition to the question of American
identity, they celebrate the largeness and fertility of the land,
personal determination, and freedom from institutional oppression.
Darker and more symbolic elements complicate the initially sunny
picture, however: the issue of slavery is raised in a particularly
disturbing episode, and the final Letter, `Distresses of a Frontier
Man,' dramatizes the disintegration of the rational enlightened
society of agrarian America into a nightmare of confusion,
incomprehension and premonitions of unspeakable evil. Written by an
emigrant French aristocrat turned farmer, the Letters from an
American Farmer has a good claim to be regarded as the first work
of American literature, at once intensely interesting in its own
right, and casting a long shadow of influence on both subsequent
American writers and European travel accounts of the moral,
spiritual and material topography of the new nation. ABOUT THE
SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made
available the widest range of literature from around the globe.
Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship,
providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable
features, including expert introductions by leading authorities,
helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for
further study, and much more.
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