The Moral Electricity of Print

Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women's Circuit, 1876-1910

Ronald Briggs

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780826521453
• eBook ISBN: 9780826521477
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Aesthetics of the Cosmopolitan Teacher
• 1. Independence and the Book in Subjunctive
• 2. Exemplary Autodidacts
• 3. Collective Feminist Biography
• 4. Novelistic Education, or, The Making of the Pan-American Reader
• 5. Educational Aesthetics and the Social Novel
• Conclusion. Publication as Mission and Identity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index