nationalism but instead ushered in the era of high sectionalism that is now marked in official U.S. nation building did not in fact lead to a golden age of U.S. She writes, “Contrary to truisms that link the production of collective affect to the existence of material institutions (from post roads to print culture), the golden age of U.S. 2 As she demonstrates, the emergence of print networks, as well as railroads and other technological routes, in the mid-nineteenth century seem to have had perhaps the inverse effect on the institution of the nation. 1 In one of the most sustained oppositions to this thesis’ applicability to the American context, Trish Loughran has recently argued that the nation dissolved at precisely the moment when mass print culture exploded. literary culture have begun to chip away at the validity of Benedict Anderson’s longstanding, influential claim that nations (“imagined communities”) emerge out of print culture.
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