Stories That Speak to Us —a digital collection of scholarly, curated exhibits—is designed to investigate literacy narratives from a number of perspectives: to explore why they are important, what information they carry about reading and composing, why they might be valuable, not only for scholars and teachers, but also for librarians, community literacy workers, individual citizens and groups of people. As the editors and authors collectively suggest, literacy narratives are powerfully rhetorical linguistic accounts through which people fashion their lives; make sense of their world, indeed construct the realities in which they live.

444 RHETORICA Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran, eds. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). In the "Editors' Introduction" to this new edition of Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran present an impressive overview of Blair's life, work, and legacy. They trace the publication, reception, and influence of the Lectures, providing partic­ ularly insightful discussion of the multitude of abridgements and derivative works that represented Blair's work to so many. They sketch Blair's early education and his university training, then lead readers through his life as a preacher, man of letters, and university lecturer. Finally, they assess Blair's place in the history of eighteenth-century rhetorical theory. The "Introduction" provides an authoritative survey of scholarship on some of the key issues related to Blair's work including Blair's influence on the teaching of writing in universities, on the emerging discipline of literary criticism, and on the continuing shift of the focus of rhetorical theory from oral declamation to written language (especially belles lettres). FerreiraBuckley and Halloran's extensive research in archival materials related to Blair's career and published work allows them to contribute new insights to all of these lines of inquiry. This reader found particularly interesting their reminder that Blair's Lectures not only informed later college curricula but also played a significant role in "schools, in literary societies and clubs, and in home study" (xxi). An annotated copy of the Lectures in St. Andrews University's rare book collection, for instance, provides evidence of the ways that individuals studied and used the Lectures, and I wanted to hear more about that body of evidence. Ferreira-Bucklev and Halloran end their Introduction with an innovative analysis of the curious fact that Blair "makes little mention of the works of any of the great visual artists who were his contemporaries" despite his "heavy reliance on visual metaphors and analogies" (xlvi-xlvii). Similarly, they note that Blair says nothing about contemporary music. Despite repeated references to the connections between poetry and music, Blair never acknowledges work by contemporaries such as Handel and Purcell, both of whom had set English poetry to music. While acknowledging that his inattention to contemporary art and music may simply reflect Blair's "pedagogical purpose," the editors argue that the larger significance of these lacunae may lie in the fact that "the printing press had long since created the conditions for a kind of sedentary cosmopolitanism in the textual realm" (xlviii). In short, Blair did not get out of Scotland much and " 'the age of mechanical reproduction' of visual and musical works would not arrive for another century," leaving his "experience, while rich in the literary arts,... impoverished with respect to other media" (xlviii). Through arguments like these, Ferreira-Buckley and Halloran's Introduction suggests new lines of inquiry into Blair's Lectures. Beyond the "Introduction," this volume consists mostly of an edition of the Lectures based on the 1785 London edition, which contained Blair's Reviews 445 corrections to the 1783 first edition. As a textual edition, the volume is something of a puzzle. To he sure, the text seems trustworthy with regard to what textual editors traditionally termed "substantives"—the words of the chosen copy text—but some of the editorial decisions, and the lack of textual apparatus, leave the goals of the edition unclear. The main goal of the volume is to bring the 1785 edition of Blair's Lectures back into print (it was last published in facsimile by Garland in 1970, five years after Southern Illinois University Press published a facsimile of the 1783 edition). While the 1785 edition is no longer in print, the entire text is currently available online (in a searchable facsimile edition) through Gale's Eighteenth-Centun/ Collections Online. (This new edition is also searchable online via Google Book Search, though one can read only a limited number of sample pages on that site.) The editors argue further that to "truly understand Blair's influence, scholars must begin to study differences among editions and abridgments, because what readers took away from Blair's Lectures...

RHETORICA 108 from "the people", the tabloids, the dirty political infighting. Rhetoric awaits its Disraeli who can persuade the appropriate personages to bring rhetoric back to the life that damaged it in the first place, the life that is its life, for better or worse or otherwise. BRUCE KRAJEWSKI Laurentian University Craig Waddell, ed., Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment, Landmark Essays 12 (Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press-Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998) xix + 239 pp. The eleven essays reprinted in this collection map the ecotone where rhetoric and environmental politics meet. Though individual essays resist easy classification, the collection reveals important focuses of work in this sub-field. Several essays trace and evaluate characteristic lines of argument in environmental policy debates. In the lead essay, for instance, Robert Cox glosses Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's account of the locus of the irreparable in The New Rhetoric, drawing out the strategic and ethical implications of, among other deployments of this locus, "forewarnings" of irreparable damage to the environment. Jonathan Lange analyzes five characteristics of the "logic of interaction" between the timber industry and environmentalists engaged in the debate over protecting Northern spotted owl habitat in old growth forests. Other essays study (mis)constructions of audience. Craig Waddell argues that Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb failed to "reconstitute" its audience because it did not articulate "a more comprehensive [ecocentric] framework" to replace egocentric and anthropocentric ethical frameworks (p. 68), while Tarla Rai Peterson and Cristi Choat Horton study ranchers' sense of stewardship for the land "to show how communication that responds attentively to an audience's perspective can assist in retrieving potential points of affiliation among diverse groups" (p 168). Reviews 109 Still other essays focus on the ethos of environmental advocates. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer consider the charge of hysteria lodged against Rachel Carson and other environmentalists, arguing that the "environmentalist and the nature writer, in becoming 'voices for the earth'...represent the return of the repressed, the coming into consciousness of that which, having been avoided for far too long, has created an illness within the mind-body system of earthly existence" (p. 37). However, they note that "like any political position, environmentalism seeks to restrict access to certain subject positions just as surely as it opens access to others" (p. 50), and like Peterson and Horton, they warn against this exclusionary tendency. Finally, some essays view environmental debates through wide cultural lenses. For instance, Christine Oravec argues that the debate over damming Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park was settled not so much by the explicit arguments of the conservationists and preservationists engaged in the debate as by the alignment of conservationists' arguments with "prevailing presumptions concerning the nature of the 'public' and its relationship to the natural environment", presumptions characteristic of early twentieth-century Progressive politics (p. 17). All of these essays conceive of environmental rhetoric in deliberative terms, focusing on conflicts over public policy (individual essay titles bristle with terms such as "controversy", "confrontation", "conflict", "dispute", and "opposition" or evoke contentious deliberative situations). Accordingly, this collection provides an excellent introduction to rhetorical studies of environmental policy debates. But readers should keep in mind that there are more discourses on earth than can be studied from any one perspective. The disciplinary rhetoric of environmental sciences and the epideictic rhetoric of much American nature writing are just two of the landscapes that lie for the most part beyond the bounds of this particular map. H. Lewis Ulman The Ohio State University ...

Research Article| February 01 1990 Discerning Readers: British Reviewers' Responses to Campbell's Rhetoric and Related Works H. Lewis Ulman H. Lewis Ulman Department of English, The Ohio State University, 164 West 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210-1370 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1990) 8 (1): 65–90. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1990.8.1.65 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation H. Lewis Ulman; Discerning Readers: British Reviewers' Responses to Campbell's Rhetoric and Related Works. Rhetorica 1 February 1990; 8 (1): 65–90. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1990.8.1.65 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1990, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1990 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.