{"product_id":"the-story-of-a","title":"The Story of A","description":"\u003cp\u003eRichly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, \u003ci\u003eThe Story of A\u003c\/i\u003e relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOffering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as \"A is for apple.\" The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for the \"republic of ABC\" a cultural potency equivalent to its high-culture counterpart, the \"republic of letters,\" while shaping its child-readers into consumers. As a central rite of socialization, alphabetization schooled children to conflicting expectations, as well as to changing models of authority, understandings of the world, and uses of literature.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the nineteenth century, literacy became a crucial aspect of American middle-class personality and subjectivity. Furnishing the readers and writers needed for a national literature, the alphabetization of America between 1800 and 1850 informed the sentimental-reform novel as well as the self-consciously aesthetic novel of the 1850s. Through readings of conduct manuals, reading primers, and a sentimental bestseller, the author shows how the alphabet became embedded in a maternal narrative, which organized the world through domestic affections.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, insisted on the artificiality of the alphabet and its practices in his antimimetic, hermetic \u003ci\u003eThe Scarlet Letter\u003c\/i\u003e, with its insistent focus on the letter A. By understanding this novel as part of the network of alphabetization, \u003ci\u003eThe Story of A\u003c\/i\u003e accounts for its uniquely persistent cultural role. The author concludes, in an epilogue, with a reading of postmodern alphabets and their implications for the future of literacy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n","brand":"Patricia Crain","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53615965471100,"sku":"9780804731744","price":129.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0251\/4980\/0541\/files\/9780804731744_597c4484-f13e-44b5-b0fd-f3f164e90687.jpg?v=1727351642","url":"https:\/\/combined-academic.myshopify.com\/products\/the-story-of-a","provider":"Combined Academic Publishers - Mare Nostrum Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}