1771, A Literary History: Genre, Origin, and Authorship

The 1771 Project sought to create a literary history confined to a single year and to three cities through creating an organized database of the wide range of literature circulating at that time. The unique approach of this project is its presentation and analysis of these assorted literatures as a focused representation of the literary, philosophical, and political genres and themes present in the literary scene at the time, in addition to its usefulness in attempting to reconstruct a semblance of daily life in the year 1771. Genre becomes the intangible webbing between the social, temporal, and geographic contexts of writings, as it becomes invaluable in the grouping and analysis of specific texts. By creating separate 'genre systems' and approximating the print environments of London, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia through these genre groupings, this project has connected the social and cultural narratives of 1771 to the variations in genre present in that year. Through this novel approach to digital histories and focus on genre contexts, the 1771 Project has produced a snapshot of the print environment of 1771 and the associated demographics behind its creation.