Landmark Essays on Historiographies of Rhetorics

This reader presents essays that editor Victor Vitanza describes as "efforts at revisionary histories that are either quasi-traditional histories or radical subversive histories." They are influential works published over the past four decades by major rhetoricians and historians with radically different presumptions and challenges to the status quo of history. Their discussions present a full array of possible histories in terms of originations, classicisms, scientific objectivities, temporalities, literary criticisms, feminisms, modernity/post-modernity, aesthetics, and perpetually more and more contestations. Providing a forum for scholars’ original voices as the discussions have developed over the decades, this collection is a unique and valuable text for advanced study on the history of rhetoric.