Wit, Virtue, and Emotion
British Women's Enlightenment Rhetoric
Published on 30. November 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
264 pages
978-0-8093-3827-6 (ISBN)
Description
Women's persuasion and performance in the Age of EnlightenmentOver a century before first-wave feminism, British women's Enlightenment rhetoric prefigured nineteenth-century feminist arguments for gender equality, women's civil rights, professional opportunities, and standardized education. Author Elizabeth Tasker Davis rereads accepted histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British rhetoric, claiming a greater variety and power of women's rhetoric. This recovery of British women's performative and written roles as speakers, spectators, authors, and readers in diverse venues counters the traditional masculine model of European Enlightenment rhetoric. Davis broadens women's Enlightenment rhetorics to include highly public venues such as theaters, clubs, salons, and debating societies, as well as the mediated sites of the periodical essay, the treatise on rhetorical theory, and women's written proposals, plans, defenses and arguments for education. Through these sites, women's rhetorical postures diverged from patriarchal prescriptions rather to deliver protofeminist persuasive performances of wit, virtue, and emotion.
Davis examines context, the effects of memory and gendering, and the cultural sites and media of women's rhetoric to reveal a fuller ecology of British Enlightenment rhetoric. Each chapter covers a cultural site of women's rhetorical practice-the court, the stage, the salon, and the printed page. Applying feminist rhetorical theory, Davis documents how women grasped their rhetorical ability in this historical moment and staged a large-scale transformation of British women from subalterns to a vocal counterpublic in British society.
Davis examines context, the effects of memory and gendering, and the cultural sites and media of women's rhetoric to reveal a fuller ecology of British Enlightenment rhetoric. Each chapter covers a cultural site of women's rhetorical practice-the court, the stage, the salon, and the printed page. Applying feminist rhetorical theory, Davis documents how women grasped their rhetorical ability in this historical moment and staged a large-scale transformation of British women from subalterns to a vocal counterpublic in British society.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Carbondale
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
8 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
340 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8093-3827-6 (9780809338276)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Elizabeth Tasker Davis is a professor of English and a coordinator of graduate studies at Stephen F. Austin State University. Her scholarship on eighteenth-century British women writers, Restoration actresses, eighteenth-century rhetoric, and feminist research practices has been published in the South Atlantic Review, Rhetoric Review, Peitho, Re/Framing Identifications, and the Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies. She is also co-editor of British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century: The Politics of Gender, Lampoonery, and Literary Caricature, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University press in 2022.
Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. A Revolution in Mood: Emblems, Embodiment, and Ephemera
2. On the Stage: Dramatized Women's Rhetoric
3. In Sociable Venues: Clubs, Salons, and Debating Societies
4. On the Page: Written Rhetoric and Arguments About Education
Reflection on Findings
Appendix A: Eighteenth-century Terminology for Sex and Gender Identity
Appendix B: Table of Precedency Among Ladies
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Introduction
1. A Revolution in Mood: Emblems, Embodiment, and Ephemera
2. On the Stage: Dramatized Women's Rhetoric
3. In Sociable Venues: Clubs, Salons, and Debating Societies
4. On the Page: Written Rhetoric and Arguments About Education
Reflection on Findings
Appendix A: Eighteenth-century Terminology for Sex and Gender Identity
Appendix B: Table of Precedency Among Ladies
Bibliography
Notes
Index