Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-century BostonUniv of South Carolina Press, 1999 - 136 pages Situated in mid-nineteenth-century Boston culture, Genteel Rhetoric combines history and cultural studies to examine the shaping of nineteenth-century North American rhetoric and aesthetics. The practitioners of genteel rhetoric included many of the writers who belonged to the New England school: Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Eliot Norton, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Harvard graduates and students of Edward T. Channing, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory from 1819 to 1851, these men were also influenced by the Unitarian rhetoric of Channing's brother, William Ellery Channing, as well as by orators such as Edward Everett. They were part of a larger North American refinement movement - a movement interrupted by the Civil War. |
Contents
Teaching and Preaching Culture and Character | 18 |
Authorizing High Culture Authorizing Self | 44 |
Elevation and Degradation | 78 |
Rhetoric and War | 99 |
Works Cited | 125 |
Common terms and phrases
abolition abolitionist American Anti-Slavery Writings argument Atlantic audience authority autocrat became become benevolence Blair Boston Brahmin Broaddus called Calvinism Calvinist Channing argued Christian Civil created degraded describes disinterested divine Edelstein editor Edward Channing Edward Everett elevate elite eloquence England essay faculties father Federalist four writers Fugitive Slave Law genius genius/writer genteel rhetoric habitus Harvard Higginson writes high culture highly cultivated Holmes's human Hutcheson ideas intellectual James Russell Lowell John Brown labor language Lectures literary literature Lowell's Massachusetts metaphors mind moral sense nature nineteenth-century Oliver Wendell Holmes orator passion philosophy political power of character practice principles professor Quintilian race Ralph Waldo Emerson reader reading reason Scottish Enlightenment Scottish philosophers Selected Prose Self-Culture slaveholders slavery social society Socrates speak speech story Sumner sympathy taste taught Thomas Wentworth Higginson tion tradition Unitarianism Vesey voice William Ellery Channing words wrote young