"Individualism is arguably the most vital tenet of American national identity: American cultural heroes tend to be mavericks and nonconformists, and independence is the fulcrum of the American origin story. But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of American artists, writers, and educational philosophers cast imitation and emulation as central to the linked projects of imaging the self and consolidating the nation. Tracing continuities between literature, material culture, and pedagogical theory, William Huntting Howell uncovers an America that celebrated the virtures of humility, contingency, and connection to a complex whole over ambition and distinction. Against Self-Reliance revalues and rethinks what it meant to be repetitive, derivative, or pointedly generic in the early repbulic and beyond"--Jacket.

Machine generated contents note:pt. I COPY-WRITING -- ch. 1 Imitatio Franklin, or the American Example -- ch. 2 Phillis Wheatley's Dependent Harmonies -- pt. II EMULATION AND ETHICS -- ch. 3 Reproducing David Rittenhouse -- ch. 4 The Republican Girl and the Spirit of Emulation -- pt. III CRITIQUES AND AFFIRMATIONS -- ch. 5 The Horrors of the Republican Machine -- ch. 6 The Copyist Moby-Dick.