The Fourth of July

The many interconnections between public rhetoric, political oratory, and literature in the early American republic are examined in this volume. It focuses on the declamatory literature associated with the Declaration of Independence and how American orators ans writers reacted to it, thus taking a close look at the reevaluation and crises which the ideology of American civil religion has been subject to.
The reader is first introduced to the Declaration, then to Fourth of July celebrations, their contribution to political symbolism, and their influence on the spoken and the written word. Later chapters are devoted to stylistic and rethoric analyses of Fourth of July odes, orations of various kinds, and major writers who drew upon Fourth of July rhetoric in significant ways. In closing, parodies and burlesques are discussed as carnivalesque versions of the sacred scriptures of American civil religion.
The essays concentrate on an period in American history when the spoken and the written word vied with one another for the attention of the political public. Their emphasis is on the impact public rhetoric had on the literary imagination.