How to write: The remaking of rhetoric in Stowe, Dickinson, Wells and Stein (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Ida B. Wells, Gertrude Stein)

Official histories of rhetoric have until recently told the story of masculine endeavor. How to Write: The Remaking of Rhetoric in Stowe, Dickinson, Wells and Stein interrogates historical and discursive formations of rhetorical culture in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States from a feminist perspective. While feminist revisions within the history of rhetoric have expanded our understanding of women's relationship to rhetoric, they have overlooked an important connection to literary writers. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Ida B. Wells and Gertrude Stein lived at a time when rhetorical conceptions of language were shifting considerably. The New Rhetoric, particularly through the influential treatises of Hugh Blair and George Campbell, dominated nineteenth-century rhetorical theory in the United States, revised classical notions of communal discourse, and incorporated modern philosophic theories of the human mind. This study demonstrates how these writers were deeply rooted in the rhetorical traditions that purported to exclude them. This dissertation connects Stowe's "sentimental" rhetoric to faculty psychology, explores Dickinson's handwriting as a rhetorical not aesthetic concern, locates Wells's arguments from experience within the shift from philosophical to psychological rhetoric, and reads Stein's syntactic experiments as an critical response to the move in the university away from rhetoric toward composition defined increasingly as grammatical correctness at the century's end. We can reconceptualize these writers as rhetoricians, theorists of language in their own right, a designation from which they and so many other women remain excluded. Further, we can extrapolate their rhetorical theories that work within, but are distinct from, the dominant rhetorical traditions of their time. By deconstructing the New Rhetoric and showing that in its applications by these women writers it becomes something different, something other than male, public discourse, this study demands a rethinking of how we understand both rhetorical theory and the history of rhetoric in the nineteenth century.