Title: Genteel rhetoric
First published: 1999
Description: 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.

Broaddus argues that the genteel and coherent voices with which these writers discuss literature and high culture break apart when they begin to write about material issues related to slavery, abolition, and war against the background of growing dissent between North and South.

Genteel Rhetoric examines the writers as they live through and write about the Civil War - Emerson and Lowell from a safe distance, Holmes searching for his wounded son in Maryland, and Higginson in the thick of action as colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first regiment of former slaves in the Union army.
Subjects: American Authors, American literature, Authors, American, English language, History, History and criticism, Homes and haunts, Intellectual life, Language and culture, Rhetoric, Social aspects, Social aspects of Rhetoric, Study and teaching, Technique, Unitarians, Higginson, thomas wentworth, 1823-1911, Holmes, oliver wendell, 1809-1894, Lowell, james russell, 1819-1891, Emerson, ralph waldo, 1803-1882
Places: Boston, Boston (Mass.), Massachusetts, United States
People: James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PS255.B6 B76 1999