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Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education: Series Editor’s Preface

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education
Series Editor’s Preface
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table of contents
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Series Editor’s Preface
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Prologue
  9. Introduction: Beyond Civic Engagement
    1. Genres for Romantic Epistolary Rhetoric
      1. Heteronormative Genre Instruction and Queer Practices
      2. Epistolary Address, Exchange, and Genre-Queer Practices
      3. Romantic Letters as Epistolary Rhetoric
    2. Education, Gender, and Sexuality in the Postal Age
      1. Letter-Writing Instruction during Rhetoric’s Period of Decline
      2. Gender, Letters, and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Rhetoric
      3. Same-Sex Romantic Friendships before Sexual Identity Categories
    3. Expanding Histories of Rhetorical Education for Civic and Romantic Engagement
  10. Chapter 1: “The language of the heart”: Genre Instruction in Heteronormative Relations
    1. Complete Letter Writers
    2. Genre Conventions in Heteronormative Models
      1. Romantic Letters and Writing from the Heart
      2. Epistolary Address and the Gendered Coupling of Romantic Relations
      3. Letter Pacing and the Exercise of Restraint
      4. Rhetorical Purpose and the Marriage Telos
    3. Invention Strategies with Queer Effects
      1. Copying from Others’ Hearts
      2. Category-Crossing Forms of Address
      3. Letter Writing with Urgency and Intensity
      4. Repurposing the Romantic Subgenre
    4. Imagining Letter-Writing Manuals as Pedagogical Failures
  11. Chapter 2: “To address you My Husband”: Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus’s Queer Epistolary Exchange
    1. Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus’s Correspondence
    2. Queering Genre Conventions within Same-Sex Epistolary Rhetoric
      1. Romantic Address across Categories of Gender and Relationship
      2. Epistolary Exchange with Urgency and Intensity
      3. Repurposing to Erotic and Political Ends
    3. Rhetorical Strategies of Invention for Adapting the Language of the Heart
      1. Composing with Language of the Heart from Poetry
      2. Composing about Language of the Heart from the Novel
    4. Reading Romantic Letters as Learned and Crafted Epistolary Rhetoric
  12. Chapter 3: “Somehow or other, queer in the extreme”: Albert Dodd’s Civic Training and Genre-Queer Practices
    1. Albert Dodd’s Multigenre Epistolary Rhetoric
    2. Classically Modeled Rhetorical Education for Civic Engagement
      1. Orientation to Civic Participation
      2. Broad Study of “Rhetorical” and “Literary” Genres
      3. Practice with Oratory and Writing
    3. Genre-Queer Practices for Romantic Engagement
      1. Composing Self-Rhetorics on Literary Representations of Same-Sex Erotic Relations
      2. Shifting Genres from Commonplace Book to Diary
      3. Inventing Romantic Epistolary Address and Exchange through Diary Writing
      4. Mixing Epistolary and Poetic Address and Exchange
    4. Rhetorically Situating Letters within Networks of Related Genres
  13. Conclusion: Toward Queer Failure
  14. Notes
  15. Works Cited
  16. Index

Page ix →Series Editor’s Preface

Pamela VanHaitsma’s Queering Rhetorical Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education asks how the rhetorical genre of romantic letter writing was adapted in nineteenth-century America from the widespread notion that rhetoric had fundamentally to do with civic and public matters and was put to use in the composition of romantic relationships—and, in the cases at issue, in learning a rhetoric for composing queer romantic relationships. What she discovers fundamentally challenges the taken-for-granted supremacy and stability of the civic, the heteronormative, and the romantic, and of their composition through speech and writing—that is, through the learning, teaching, and practice of rhetoric.

Professor VanHaitsma’s work is richly informed by extended archival research. Her exploration of nineteenth-century American letter-writing manuals is based largely on work she conducted at the University of Pittsburgh’s Nietz Collection of American textbooks and reveals, in her account, how letter writers were guided in their treatment of class, race, gender, and other dimensions of social relations. She then turns to other archives for collections of romantic correspondence between same-sex letter writers. Here, she begins with the romantic correspondence of two African American women, Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus. She shows how the correspondents appropriate, adapt, and defy the racial and gender conventions of letter-writing manuals and romantic poetry.

VanHaitsma then turns to the case of Albert Dodd, a graduate of Yale College with training in classical and nineteenth-century arts of civic rhetorical practice, who adapted and transgressed the rules of those arts in his own extensive romantic correspondence with both women and men. VanHaitsma’s exploration ends with a historically and theoretically grounded invitation to reconceptualize the conventions and expectations of rhetorical education.

This brilliant and generous book may prompt us all to reimagine our notions of the scope, the methods, and the promise of rhetorical study.

THOMAS W. BENSON Page x →

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