"These poems are like yen the color and the size of dollars. They are American poems, they are English, but they almost seem like versions of the Japanese. The music is lovely and the form is graceful. They are a delight to read."--Gerald Stern

In this study of thirteenth-century poetry and prose composition, William M. Purcell corrects the tendency of classical historiographers to marginalize the contributions of medieval rhetoric and, specifically, to obscure the importance of ars poetriae. Defining the genre as a unique hybrid of rhetoric and grammar, he contends that it should be understood as a development important for its time and pertinent to the evolution of rhetorical theory. Purcell suggests that the medieval genre holds contemporary significance as a model for rhetorical concerns brought to light by the critiques of...

Focusing on the works of lesser-known yet influential Deists, the author examines the 70-year polemic between the Church of England and the English Deists, illuminating the rhetorical war which raged between them. He contends that Deism owes its significance to these skilled controversialists.

Most traditional works of rhetorical history have excluded the activities of women, but Listening to Their Voices retrieves the voices of women who contributed to the rhetorical realm. The nineteen essays in the collection extend existing definitions of rhetoric and enrich conventional knowledge of rhetorical history. In her introduction Molly Meijer Wertheimer traces the patriarchal nature of traditional rhetorical histories as well as the continuing debate about how best to write women into rhetoric's historical record. The volume's essays advance rhetorical theory by examining exceptional...

Explores how five turn-of-the-century women - Frances Willard, Anna Howard Shaw, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman and Mary Church Terrell - crafted autobiographies that became persuasive models for the women of their generation, and lead to movements for social change.

This text examines Plato's vision of his dialogues becoming sophistic texts open to a variety of interpretations. The author argues that Plato's lasting influence results not from the force of dialogues themselves, but from continued investments in arguing about the dialogues.

Nola J. Heidlebaugh considers the question of how, in an age of diversity and pluralism, contemporary society can productively address divisive issues. Looking at the dominant postmodern understandings of rhetoric, as well as at arguments extracted from Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Heidlebaugh finds that many social debates are regarded as intractable because of an incommensurability between the conceptions figuring in the competing positions taken. She offers a redefinition of rhetoric that moves beyond stalemates and produces more inventive...

WIDELY HAILED as one of America's greatest rhetorical theorists, Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) ranged freely across many fields of knowledge, investigating the ways language, literature, and ideas relate to one another and to the social and political aspects of life. Skeptical of disciplinary boundaries, Burke garnered both praise and censure for his eclecticism. While several intellectual movements - including the New Critics - have claimed him as a member, Burke himself strongly resisted such affiliations. In a comprehensive examination of Burke's achievements, Ross Wolin sifts through the...

While scholars of American history have written extensively about slave insurgency in the form of rebellion, William E. Wiethoff considers a more subtle form of resistance that caused considerable consternation among slave-holders -- that of insolence. Though he finds insolence to have been a rarely and carefully used "rhetoric of resistance, " Wiethoff also finds the practice to have been one to which slaveowners were especially sensitive and which they sought to prevent by legislative, social, moral, and commercial means.

In this original contribution to the study of seventeenth-,...