New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies [Hardcover]

Named moral father of the Internet by Wired Magazine and quoted by President Barack Obama in his historic first inaugural address, Thomas Paine is an American revolutionary figure who continues to intrigue and infuriate. New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Paine's distinctive influence on a number of eighteenth-century discourses, from politics and literature, to human rights and religion. This volume aims to expand the field of study on one of the most important figures not simply in the American, but the global revolutionary period of the late eighteenth-century. Drawing on an international group of scholars who hope to deconstruct the nationalistic boundaries that have hampered Paine studies for decades, the essays offer not only new interpretations of Paine's major works, but new methodologies that reflect the enduring presence of Paine in American cultural discourse.

This book propels the study of American revolutionary and radical Thomas Paine into the twenty-first century by engaging an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars in an exploration of Paine's role in politics, literature, and the invention of the global.

1. The Historiographical and Cultural Impact of Thomas Paine: A Quantitative Approach; Raymond Irwin
2. Examining the Thomas Paine Corpus: Automated Computer Authorship Attribution Methodology Applied to Thomas Paine's Writings; Gary Berton, Smiljana Petrovic, Lubomir Ivanov, and Robert Schiaffino
3. 'A Kind of Bee-Hive': Thomas Paine and the Pennsylvania Magazine; Peter Chapin and Kara Nowakowski
4. Apostles of Freedom: Pro-French American Democrats and Thomas Paine as Religious Crusaders; Matthew Rainbow Hale
5. Paine's Rights Reconsidered; Gregory Claeys
6.?Irreligion Made Easy: The Reaction to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason; Patrick Hughes
7. Thomas Paine's Le Si?cle de la Raison, ou lă!