In urban areas from Boston to Charleston, the elite men and women of
eighteenth-century British America came together in a variety of private
venues to communicate and interact. David Shields looks into the
taverns, tea rooms, salons, coffee houses, card parties, clubs, and
fraternities where these displays of civility took place. He argues that
such spaces, formed outside the domain of the state, became key sites
for elite discursive formation, for the articulation and enactment of
the values of civility. In an important reinterpretation of early
American literary history, he argues that the belles lettres generated
for and within these institutions in fact represent a powerful colonial
genre involving experimentation with manners and social identities. By
examining the language and forms of various "texts" - including
conversations, letters, privately circulated manuscripts, and other
forms of expression - he reconstructs the discourse of civility that
flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America.