Much has been written about Ralph Waldo Emerson's fundamental contributions to American literature and culture as an essayist, philosopher, lecturer, and poet. However, despite wide agreement among literary and rhetorical scholars on the need for further study of Emerson as a rhetorical theorist, not much has been published on the subject. Emerson and the History of Rhetoric fills this gap in our knowledge, reenvisioning Emerson's work through his significant engagement with rhetorical theory throughout his career and providing a more profound understanding of Emerson's influence on American ideology. Moving beyond dominant literary critical thinking about Emerson's public speaking by discussing it in the context of rhetorical history, Thompson argues that for Emerson, rhetoric was both imaginative and nonsystematic. The book covers the influences of rhetoricians from a range of periods on Emerson's model of rhetoric, including Plato, Augustine, Edmund Burke, and Hugh Blair. Thompson analyzes Emerson's application of Plato's search for transcendental truth and democratic access to the means of persuasion; the Ciceronian rhetoric of Edmund Burke, which Emerson conceived as the perfect balance between common and aristocratic speech; and Augustine's idea of submission. Drawing on Emerson's manuscript notes, journal entries, and some of his rarely discussed essays and lectures as well as his more famous works, the author demonstrates not only Emerson's relevance to rhetorical history but also rhetorical history's relevance to Emerson and nineteenth-century American literature and culture. This book bridges the divide between literary and rhetorical studies, expanding our understanding of this iconic nineteenth-century man of letters.

Drawing upon Rostow's writings, public speeches, congressional testimony, personal interviews, and recently declassified documents, Pearce examines the economist's protracted campaign to convince policymakers to apply his theory of economic growth to the development aid initiatives of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Celebrating the various ethnic traditions that melded to create what we now call American literature, Whitman did his best to encourage an international reaction to his work. But even he would have been startled by the multitude of ways in which his call has been answered. By tracking this wholehearted international response and reconceptualizing American literature, Walt Whitman and the World demonstrates how various cultures have appropriated an American writer who ceases to sound quite so narrowly American when he is read into other cultures' traditions.

The subject of this book is literary rhetoric which is treated both in a historical outline and a systematic concept, implemented in analyses of literary texts of all ages and languages.

In Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric, Robert Danisch examines the search by America's first generation of pragmatists for a unique set of rhetorics that would serve the needs of a developing democracy. Digging deep into pragmatism's historical development, Danisch sheds light on its association with an alternative but significant and often overlooked tradition. He draws parallels between the rhetorics of such American pragmatists as John Dewey and Jane Addams and those of the ancient Greek tradition. Danisch contends that, while building upon a classical foundation, pragmatism sought to determine rhetorical responses to contemporary irresolutions. rhetoric, including pragmatism's rejection of philosophy with its traditional assumptions and practices. Grounding his argument on an

The essays collected here, written for this volume by an international team of distinguished Whitman scholars, examine a variety of issues in Whitman's life and art. Their varying approaches mirror the diversity of contemporary scholarship and the breadth of target that Whitman affords for such examination. The authors of these essays address a wide range of issues befitting a poet of his stature and ambiguity: Whitman and photography, Whitman and feminist scholarship, Whitman and modernism, Whitman and the poetics of address, Whitman and the poetics of present participles, Whitman and Borges, Whitman and Isadora Duncan, Whitman and the Civil War, Whitman and the politics of his era, and Whitman and the changing nature of his style in his later years. Addressed to an audience of students and general readers and written in a nontechnical prose designed to promote accessibility to the study of Whitman, this volume includes a chronology of Whitman's life and suggestions for further reading.