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By Michael Warner. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. xviii + 205 pp. $25.00.)
Michael Warner has joined the circle of literary scholars--Cathy Davidson, Jay Fliegelman, Myra Jehlen--whose work commands the attention of colonial historians. Those who have already scanned The Letters of the Republic may not welcome that news, but much must be said in favor of this learned and original book before admitting its shortcomings.
Warner's aim is to analyze the mutually transforming relationship between print and republican political culture in eighteenth-century America, and he succeeds better than any author to date. Starting from the proposition that the purposes, meaning, and uses of print have changed over time, he sets forth the singular, "historically constituted" vision of printing that prevailed among Americans by the middle of the eighteenth century. John Adams...