The principal idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract 'formal approach and an equally abstract ideological approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenonsocial throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning. -M. M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel (259)

The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment by Ian Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 218 + xv pp. Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric by Patricia Roberts‐Miller. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 209 + xiii. The View from On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac by Omar Swartz. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 130 pp. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy by Kathleen E. Welch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 256 pages. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres by Gerard A. Hausen Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 335p. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by Peter Dimock. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press (Illinois State University), 1998. 118 pp.