Book Cover
E-book
Author Broaddus, Dorothy C

Title Genteel rhetoric : writing high culture in nineteenth-century Boston / Dorothy C. Broaddus
Published Columbia, S.C. : University of South Carolina Press, ©1999

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Description 1 online resource (xiii, 136 pages)
Series Studies in rhetoric/communication
Studies in rhetoric/communication.
Contents Preface -- Introduction: rhetoric and culture -- Teaching and preaching culture and character -- Authorizing high culture, authorizing self -- Elevation and degradation -- Rhetoric and war -- Works cited -- Index
Summary Situated in mid-nineteenth-century Boston culture, Genteel Rhetoric combines history and cultural studies to examine the shaping of nineteenth-century North American rhetoric and aesthetics. The practitioners of genteel rhetoric included many of the writers who belonged to the New England school: Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Eliot Norton, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Harvard graduates and students of Edward T. Channing, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory from 1819 to 1851, these men were also influenced by the Unitarian rhetoric of Channing's brother, William Ellery Channing, as well as by orators such as Edward Everett
They were part of a larger North American refinement movement - a movement interrupted by the Civil War. Broaddus argues that the genteel and coherent voices with which these writers discuss literature and high culture break apart when they begin to write about material issues related to slavery, abolition, and war against the background of growing dissent between North and South. Genteel Rhetoric examines the writers as they live through and write about the Civil War - Emerson and Lowell from a safe distance, Holmes searching for his wounded son in Maryland, and Higginson in the thick of action as colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first regiment of former slaves in the Union army
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 125-129) and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 1823-1911 -- Technique
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894 -- Technique
Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891 -- Technique
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882 -- Technique
SUBJECT Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882 fast
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 1823-1911 fast
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894 fast
Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891 fast
Subject American literature -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- History and criticism
Rhetoric -- Social aspects -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- History -- 19th century
English language -- Rhetoric -- Study and teaching -- Massachusetts -- Boston
Language and culture -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- History -- 19th century
Unitarians -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- Intellectual life
LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General.
American literature
English language -- Rhetoric -- Study and teaching
Intellectual life
Language and culture
Rhetoric -- Social aspects
Technique
American Literature.
English.
Languages & Literatures.
SUBJECT Boston (Mass.) -- Intellectual life -- 19th century
Subject Massachusetts -- Boston
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 98019678
ISBN 0585350418
9780585350417