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david j. Carlson California State University, San Bernardino "Another Declaration of Independence" John Neal's Rachel Dyer and the Assault on Precedent Since its publication more than 20 years ago, Robert Ferguson's Law and Letters in American Culture has largely defined the critical understanding of the relationship between law and literature in the early American republic. Ferguson's central thesis, of course, is that a tight "configuration of law and letters," lasting from the Revolution until roughly the 1830s, was made possible by several closely related factors. The professional culture of late eighteenth-century America, first of all, essentially required individuals trained in the legal profession to acquire a broad liberal education and to perform in a variety of literary modes. Consequently, as Ferguson rightly points out, "lawyers wrote many of the country's first important novels, plays, and poems" (5). If the broad "interdisciplinary" demands (as we might now call them) of Revolutionary-era legal education encouraged literary pursuits by men of the bar, however, it was the specific content of that educational system that determined their form. According to Ferguson, the triumvirate of "[classical] language study, the cult of eloquence, and emulation of Ciceronian balances immersed the early American lawyer in
Early American Literature – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Nov 1, 2007
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