Clerk's Tale
Regular price
€40.99
19th century
A01=Thomas Augst
ambition
antebellum america
aspiration
Author_Thomas Augst
boarding houses
business
capitalism
Category=NHK
character
circulating libraries
civic education
clerks
coming of age
conversation
democracy
diaries
emerson
employment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
friendship
gender
habit
history
identity
intellect
intimacy
lectures
letters
literacy
literary studies
manhood
market culture
masculinity
memory
men
morals
new york mercantile library
nonfiction
office work
parlor
propriety
self development
sociability
social mobility
success
wealth
youth
Product details
- ISBN 9780226032207
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Nov 2003
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Thousands of men left their families for the bustling cities of nineteenth-century America, where many of them found work as clerks. The Clerk's Tale recounts their remarkable story, describing the struggle of aspiring businessmen to come of age at the dawn of the modern era. How did these young men understand the volatile world of American capitalism and make sense of their place within it?
Thomas Augst follows clerks as they made their way through the boarding houses, parlors, and offices of the big city. Tracing the course of their everyday lives, Augst shows how these young men used acts of reading and writing to navigate the anonymous world of market culture and claim identities for themselves within it. Clerks, he reveals, calculated their prospects in diaries, composed detailed letters to friends and family, attended lectures by key thinkers of the day, joined libraries where they consumed fiction, all while wrestling with the boredom of their work. What results, then, is a poignant look at the literary practices of ordinary people and an affecting meditation on the moral lives of men in antebellum America.
Thomas Augst follows clerks as they made their way through the boarding houses, parlors, and offices of the big city. Tracing the course of their everyday lives, Augst shows how these young men used acts of reading and writing to navigate the anonymous world of market culture and claim identities for themselves within it. Clerks, he reveals, calculated their prospects in diaries, composed detailed letters to friends and family, attended lectures by key thinkers of the day, joined libraries where they consumed fiction, all while wrestling with the boredom of their work. What results, then, is a poignant look at the literary practices of ordinary people and an affecting meditation on the moral lives of men in antebellum America.
