Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Civility appears as an integral, yet complicated feature of the political and social transformations of the pre- and post-revolutionary periods in America. On the one hand, the discourse of politeness – with its structure of genteel deference, its historical association with the corrupt courts of Europe, and its emphasis on a politics of deceit and individual manipulation – has been identified as antithetical to the disinterestedness and egalitarianism of civic republicanism (Wood 1991; Warner 1990). On the other, civility's culture of performance – its textually and visually reproducible codes of conduct, and its ties to commercial self-interest – has been read as instrumental to the role-playing bourgeois self of post-revolutionary economic liberalism. Civility's anti-republican values of sociability, formality, and exclusivity survived the Revolution's more radical impulses by retreating into private society (Shields 1997), where their eventual diffusion as “vernacular gentility” (Bushman 1992) aided the formation of middle-class identity in antebellum America (Halttunen 1982).Perhaps no text was more responsible for the downward distribution of civility in post-revolutionary America than Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his son (1774; Stanhope 1932). When the various authorized and unauthorized editions, adaptations, and abridgments are counted, the Letters went through no fewer ... log in or subscribe to read full text