In Print Technology in Scotland and America

Louis Kirk McAuley investigates the mediation of popular-political culture in Scotland and America, from the transatlantic religious revivals known as the Great Awakening to the U.S. presidential election of 1800.

By focusing on Scotland and America—and, in particular, the tension between unity and fragmentation that characterizes eighteenth-century Scottish and American literature and culture—Print Technology aims to increase our understanding of how tensions within these corresponding political and cultural arenas altered the meaning of print as an instrument of empire and nation-building.

McAuley reveals how seemingly disparate events, including journalism and literary forgery, were instrumental and innovative deployments of print not as a liberation technology (as Habermas’s analysis of print's structural transformation of the public sphere suggests), but as a mediator of political tensions.