1st Edition

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State

By Michael Stancliff Copyright 2011
220 Pages
by Routledge

220 Pages
by Routledge

220 Pages
by Routledge

A prominent early feminist, abolitionist, and civil rights advocate, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote and spoke across genres and reform platforms during the turbulent second half of the nineteenth century. Her invention of a new commonplace language of moral character drew on the persuasive and didactic motifs of the previous decades of African-American reform politics, but far exceeded her... Read more

Introduction  Chapter 1. Composing Character: Cultural Sources of African American Rhetorical Pedagogy  Chapter 2. Reconstruction and Black Republican Pedagogy  Chapter 3. Temperance Pedagogy: Lessons of Character in a Drunken Economy  Chapter 4. Black Ireland: The Political Economics of African American  Rhetorical Pedagogy after Reconstruction  Chapter 5. Not as a Mere Dependent: The Historic Mission of African American Women’s Rhetoric at the End of the Century  Afterword

Biography

Michael Stancliff is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Arizona State University. He teaches and researches the history of slavery and antislavery, African American rhetoric and literature, critical race theory, and writing pedagogy. He is author with Sharon Crowley of Critical Situations: A Rhetoric for Writing in Communities.