Republic of Taste: Arts, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America by Catherine E. Kelly (review)

With deft and often graceful erudition, Catherine E. Kelly presents a cultural study of taste within the bourgeoning American Republic as that which entails a series of negotiations and calculated risks. At stake was the cultural development of a nation and how its citizens would come to define themselves in the pursuit of “discovering and exercising a distinctly American genius” (5). Kelly places foremost emphasis on defining and developing a republic of taste, a critical concept around which the work is organized, and one whose ideational origins are likely indebted to Benedict Anderson’s work on nationhood. It was Anderson, of course, who described an emergent “nation” as not merely an imagined political community but as one self-consciously shaped into historical being through the selection of ideological values most fitting to its ideals. The construction of the American Republic was thus tied to a discourse of taste—to efforts to determine what qualified as good taste, and to strategies for accessing, teaching, studying, and performing it.

Literary and cultural historians have worked to centralize the role of taste and aesthetics in colonial and early national America. Kelly cites some of the strongest efforts, including Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2007) and Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (2012). I would include Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (2009) as well, mainly for its positioning of the “sentimental project” as one central to shaping the aesthetic preferences and social ideals of early Americans. Kelly is well-versed in transatlantic discourse that defined and practised “sensibility,” and she depicts it as an observable and performative process. Sensibility, she explains, was “immediately visible to others who were similarly endowed”; taste usually relied on visual perception, but it also “operated on all kinds of phenomena, ranging from landscapes to texts to music” (15). Kelly pairs the two as virtues that were instrumental to the development of a republic of taste. Her explanation for how they operate together, while initially unclear, benefits from development in subsequent chapters in which she offers the following distinction: taste is facilitated by evaluative strategies and a vocabulary for articulating them, whereas sensibility reflects a physiological manifestation, one acutely informed by taste. She tackles contemporary debates regarding taste as either studied pretence or a response triggered by authentic simplicity, clearly opting for the former. It is from this distinction that Kelly explores patterns of education, socialization, and consumption, all of which provide citizenship into a republic of taste.

If a republic of taste is the book’s guiding concept, its explication is judiciously aided by Kelly’s pursuit of two lines of inquiry. The first concerns translating aesthetic values into everyday life—what was American taste, anyway, and how could it serve the needs of the Republic? The second explores how the textual, the visual, and the material functioned together. Each of Kelly’s six chronological chapters aims to answer such lines of inquiry in the process of providing a history of the American republic of taste. The results are impressive. The excellent first chapter examines pedagogy and curriculum at academies and seminaries in post-Revolutionary America. Much of the aesthetic education was still indebted to Europe, but radically new was the scale of the educational enterprise and its progress in producing students who viewed aesthetics with “an explicitly republican, explicitly national significance” (11). Especially engaging is her presentation of nation-building curricula and its emphasis on instilling visual literacy through the process of emulation. Emulation helped to train the eyes, to develop habits of seeing and producing. Expansive print culture (made accessible by the likes of Addison, Burke, and Hugh Blair, among others) played a significant role, as did penmanship, trips to galleries or museums, and hands-on training in the fine...