Trish Loughran: The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of US Nation Building, 1770-1870 Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2008, 568 pp, 26 illus.,

摘要

Since the 1970s, the field of print and book history has told galvanizing stories of how the printing revolution ushered in the origins of modernity [4], how the publishing business authored Enlightenment [2], how "print capitalism" cemented the rise of modern nationalisms across vast territories [1], as well as how books and print created a New-World political and public sphere called the American republic [6]. Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of US Nation Building, 1770-1870 is a bold rejoinder to such confidence in the print origins of modernity, at least to the American version in which a "print capitalism" has been credited with molding American readers into the shape of the "United States," a new kind of modern national republic.