http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/37131036

Gender and democratic sentiment : United States political culture in the early republican period, 1790-1800

My study discusses the origins of late 18th and early 19th century sentimental literature in relation to United States political philosophy of the early republican period. Drawing on Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, I argue that the 18th century democratic revolutions envision an egalitarian public sphere, a public sphere both irreducible to the state and accessible to the public-oriented sentiments of marginalized individuals and social groups. Sentimentalism, in this sense, is the cultural discourse through which political differences among antagonistic individuals and social groups are negotiated in the letters of the early republic.

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