Introduction. Book Reviews

Introduction. by Nineteenth-Century Prose Book Summary

The last ten years have witnessed a sea change in the types of critical attention we bring to bear on rhetorical theory and practice in the nineteenth century. Where scholars used to attend to famous and admitted rhetoricians such as George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and Richard Whately or to textbooks in use for college courses in rhetoric and composition, we now see a focus on the rhetorical acts of anonymous or unrecognized practitioners and a rereading of figures and texts not previously accounted as rhetorical. Shirley Wilson Logan's We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women and Lucille M. Schultz's The Young Composers: Composition's Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools are examples of the first impulse, and Douglas Thomas' Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically is an example of the second. This change in attention might best be described as the shift from a philosophical focus on overarching theory and first principles to an anthropological focus on local knowledge and ethnographic methodology. It is a shift we see throughout the humanities and the social sciences, though it is particularly marked in the recent histories of rhetoric. While there are countless reasons for this shift in focus, in this introduction we will briefly examine just one. From there we will turn to a discussion of what the essays in this special issue on rhetorical theory and practice can tell us about the kinds of attention currently being brought to bear on nineteenth-century rhetoric, and then we will speculate on what sort of work we might expect to see in the future. The main reason for a shift from global themes to local narratives is that much of the work on dominant theories and institutional practices has been done and done so well. Little if any of the work on American rhetoric in this volume and in the field at large could have been accomplished without the earlier work of such scholars as Albert Kitzhaber, whose bellwether 1953 dissertation Rhetoric in American Colleges 1850-1900 was read widely and then finally published in 1990, or Donald Stewart, whose articles on Fred Newton Scott changed the way we look at rhetoric's place in the history of composition instruction.

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