Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City by Betsy Klimasmith (review)

Abstract

This study examines how people read, wrote, and imagined American cities from the earliest decades of the republic. Focusing on works of fiction produced or set in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, it argues that fiction enabled readers to rehearse urbanity at a time when British culture continued to dominate the former colonies. Klimasmith rereads novels, plays, letters