Revising Letters and Reclaiming Space: The Case for Expanding the Search for Nineteenth-Century Women’s Letter-Writing Rhetoric into Imaginative Literature

Brenda Glascott

doi:10.58680/ce201527549

College English Nov 2015

Revising Letters and Reclaiming Space: The Case for Expanding the Search for Nineteenth-Century Women’s Letter-Writing Rhetoric into Imaginative Literature

Brenda Glascott

Abstract

The gendered rhetorical constraints imposed on female writers in mid-nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals are challenged by the representations of letter writing in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, popular mid-century novels. By investigating imaginative literature by women as a site of women’s rhetoric, feminist historians of rhetoric can recognize that the battlefield for expanding women’s rhetorical agency in the mid-nineteenth century is not primarily located at the division between domestic and public realms—the site emphasized in current histories of women’s rhetoric—but is interior, where letter-writing rhetorics seek to police habits of mind.

Journal: College English
Published: 2015-11-01
DOI: 10.58680/ce201527549
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Open Access: Closed
Topics: modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism gender and writing
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Cited by in this index (1)

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Revising Letters and Reclaiming Space: The Case for Expanding the Search for Nineteenth-Century Women’s Letter-Writing Rhetoric into Imaginative Literature

Abstract

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Cited by in this index (1)

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