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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women's Circuit, 1876-1910

The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women's Circuit, 1876-1910

Briggs, Ronald

Hardcover

Literary CriticismGeneral EducationSouth American History

ISBN10: 0826521452
ISBN13: 9780826521453
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: Jul 18 2017
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.15
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
Best Nineteenth-Century Book Award Winner, 2018, Latin American Studies Association Nineteenth-Century Section

Moral electricity-a term coined by American transcendentalists in the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century.

As Briggs notes in the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print, the ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with an anxiety about the baleful influence of a politically and morally decadent Old World that dominated literary output through its powerful publishing interests. The very nature of living as a writer and participating in the literary salons of Lima was, by definition, a revolutionary act that gave voice to the formerly colonized and now liberated people. In the actions of this literary community, as men and women worked toward the same educational goals, we see the birth of a truly independent Latin American literature.

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