Conversational Rhetoric

In Conversational Rhetoric, Jane Donawerth traces the historical development of rhetorical theory by women for women, studying the moments when women produced theory about the arts of communication in alternative genres-humanist treatises and dialogues, defenses of women's preaching, conduct books, and elocution handbooks.

"Describes the role of traditional Jewish texts in the development of modern Yiddish literature, as well as the closely related development of modern Hebrew literature"--Provided by publisher.

This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of the self associated with the development of humanism in England, and to strategies for both inclusion and exclusion in structuring the early modern nation state. It addresses writings about rhetoric and behavior from 1495–1660, beginning with Erasmus’ work on sermo or the conversational rhetoric between friends, which considers the reader as an ‘absent audience’, and following the transference of this stance to a politics whose broadening democratic constituency needed a legitimate structure for governance-at-a-distance. Unusually, the book brings together the impact on behavior of these new concepts about rhetoric, with the growth of the publishing industry, and the emergence of capitalism and of modern medicine. It explores the effects on the formation of the ‘subject’ and political legitimation of the early liberal nation state. It also lays new ground for scholarship concerned with what is left out of both selfhood and politics by that state, studying examples of a parallel development of the ‘self’ defined by friendship not only from educated male writers, but also from women writers and writers concerned with socially ‘middling’ and laboring people and the poor.

Historians of rhetoric have long worked to recover women's education in reading and writing, but have only recently begun to explore women's speaking practices, from the parlor to the platform to the varied types of institutions where women learned elocutionary and oratorical skills in preparation for professional and public life. This book fills an important gap in the history of rhetoric and suggests new paths for the way histories may be told in the future, tracing the shifting arc of women's oratorical training as it develops from forms of eighteenth-century rhetoric into institutional and extrainstitutional settings at the end of the nineteenth century and diverges into several distinct streams of community-embodied theory and practice in the twentieth. Treating key rhetors, genres, settings, and movements from the early republic to the present, these essays collectively challenge and complicate many previous claims made about the stability and development of gendered public and private spheres, the decline of oratorical culture and the limits of women's oratorical forms such as elocution and parlor rhetorics, and women's responses to rhetorical constraints on their public speaking. Enriching our understanding of women's oratorical education and practice, this cutting-edge work makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetoric and communication.

Advances in the History of Rhetoric: The First Six Years is a comprehensive collection of 29 scholarly essays published during the first phase of the journal’s history. Research from prominent and developing scholars that was once difficult to acquire is now offered in a coherent and comprehensive collection that is complemented by a detailed index and unified bibliography. This collection covers a range of periods and topics in the history of rhetoric, including Greek and Roman rhetoric, rhetoric and religion, women in the history of rhetoric, rhetoric and science, Renaissance and British rhetorical theory, rhetoric and culture, and the development of American rhetoric and composition. The editors, Richard Leo Enos and David E. Beard, provide a preface and afterword that synthesize the mission and meaning of this work for students and scholars of the history of rhetoric.

This work brings together the pivotal, scholarly essays responsible for the present resurgence in rhetorical studies. Assembled by one of the most respected senior scholars in the field of rhetoric, the essays chart a course from tradition-based theory of civic rhetoric to ongoing issues of figuration, power, and gender. Together with a lucid introductory essay, these studies help to integrate the still-volatile questions at the core of humanities scholarship in rhetoric. The introductory student as well as the seasoned scholar will gain familiarity and footing in this oldest--and still new--liberal art.

Classical Rhetoric in English, 1650 - 1800 traces the development of British rhetorical culture through English translations of selected works by Plato, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Longinus, along with a glossary of English rhetorical vocabulary.

Jost juxtaposes problems and questions in philosophy and literature, using rhetoric as the middle term and common ground between them.