Despite its centrality to its field, there is no consensus regarding what rhetorical theory is and why it matters. The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory presents a critical examination of rhetorical theory throughout history, in order to develop a unifying vision for the field. Demonstrating that theorists have always been skeptical of, yet committed to "truth" (however fantastic), Ira Allen develops rigorous notions of truth and of a "troubled freedom" that spring from rhetoric’s depths. In a sweeping analysis from the sophists Aristotle, and Cicero through Kenneth Burke, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyceta, and contemporary scholars in English, communication, and rhetoric’s other disciplinary homes, Allen offers a novel definition of rhetorical theory: as the self-consciously ethical study of how humans and other symbolic animals negotiate constraints.

Native Tributes is a sequel to Blue Ravens by Gerald Vizenor, a historical novel about Native Americans in the First World War published by Wesleyan University Press in 2014. Basile Hudon Beaulieu, a native writer, his brother Aloysius, an abstract artist, travel by train from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to Washington, D.C. where they protest with thousands of other military veterans in the Bonus Army, and their cousin By Now Rose Beaulieu, a veteran nurse, rides her horse named Treaty to the same march during the summer of 1932. Aloysius creates hand puppets and entertains the spirited veterans with the mockery of communists and President Herbert Hoover. General Douglas McArthur routes the veterans from the National Mall, and the Beaulieu brothers move to an encampment of needy veterans in Hard Luck Town on the East River in New York City. The brothers visit the Biblo and Tanner Booksellers, a gallery owned by Alfred Stieglitz, the Modicut Puppet Theatre, and an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Aloysius is inspired by Arthur Dove, Chaïm Soutine, and Marc Chagall. Native Tributes is a journey of liberty, and escapes the enticement of nostalgia and victimry. Vizenor maintains his masterly perception of oral stories, and creates a dynamic literary tribute to Native American veterans and visionary artists in the Great Depression.

Resounding the Rhetorical offers an original critical and theoretical examination of composition as a quasi-object. As composition flourishes in multiple media (digital, sonic, visual, etc.), Byron Hawk seeks to connect new materialism with current composition scholarship and critical theory. Using sound and music as his examples, he demonstrates how a quasi-object can and does materialize for communicative and affective expression, and becomes a useful mechanism for the study and execution of composition as a discipline. Through careful readings of Serres, Latour, Deleuze, Heidegger, and others, Hawk reconstructs key concepts in the field including composition, process, research, collaboration, publics, and rhetoric. His work delivers a cutting-edge response to the state of the field, where it is headed, and the possibilities for postprocess and postwriting composition and rhetoric.

Robert Penn Warren is one of the best-known and most consequential Kentucky writers of the twentieth century and the only American writer to have won three Pulitzers in two different genres. All the King's Men, generally considered one of the finest novels ever written on American politics, transcends sensationalism and topicality to stand as art. It was a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize, and became an Academy Award--winning movie. Depicting the rise and fall of a dictatorial southern politician -- modeled on Huey Long of Louisiana -- the timeless story and memorable characters raise questions about the importance of history, moral conflicts in public policy, and idealism in government.In Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion, author Jonathan S. Cullick considers the themes of this famous novel within the context of America's current political climate. He addresses the novel's continuing relevance and interviews a cross-section of elected and appointed officials, as well as journalists, in Kentucky to explore how Warren's novel has influenced their work and approach to politics.By focusing on what Warren's novel has to say about power, populism, ethics, and the force of rhetoric, Cullick encourages readers to think about their own identities and responsibilities as American citizens. This volume promises to be not only an indispensable companion to All the King's Men but it also provides context and a new diverse set of perspectives from which to understand this seminal novel.

The Odyssey is rightly celebrated as a story that goes far beyond the scope of epic poetry. It is an open window to an entire era and its social systems as well as its theological, cultural, economic and political structures, while running simultaneously in the register of the earthly and of the divine. Within The Odyssey, the episode of the Sirens stands out as an exceptionally evocative example of this kind of achievement. This volume is dedicated to exploring the myriad levels of analysis that are allowed by this famous episode, following in the footsteps of celebrated readers of The Odyssey such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Lukàcs, Auerbach, Kerény, Bloch, Auden, Pound, Tolstoj, Elster and Steiner. By looking at the brief encounter between Ulysses and the Sirens, the reader of this volume will discover the roots of our modern concept of middle class rationality and its profound ramifications stretching between economy, politics, and the divine.

Lectionary studies were almost abandoned after the mid-twentieth century, and the recent revival of interest in the Greek Lectionary has concentrated exclusively on the Gospel Lectionary. Gibson reintroduces the value of the Apostolos yet incorporates modern methodology in order to build upon the work of recent Lectionary scholarship, analysing New Testament and liturgical textual traditions together, both compilation and continuous text. Through this process, it is shown that the Apostolos witness is not usually copied to another and that consequently there is no ‘Lectionary text’ of Acts and Paul. Instead, Apostolos copies reflect textual variation in the evolving Byzantine tradition. This study concentrates on the Apostolos in its scribal, monastic, liturgical, and theological context as well as in light of other manuscript traditions.

Frederick Douglass (1818--1895) was a prolific writer and public speaker whose impact on American literature and history has been long studied by historians and literary critics. Yet as political theorists have focused on the legacies of such notables as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Douglass's profound influence on Afro-modern and American political thought has often been undervalued.In an effort to fill this gap in the scholarship on Douglass, editor Neil Roberts and an exciting group of established and rising scholars examine the author's autobiographies, essays, speeches, and novella. Together, they illuminate his genius for analyzing and articulating core American ideals such as independence, liberation, individualism, and freedom, particularly in the context of slavery. The contributors explore Douglass's understanding of the self-made American and the way in which he expanded the notion of individual potential by arguing that citizens had a responsibility to improve not only their own situations but also those of their communities. A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass also considers the idea of agency, investigating Douglass's passionate insistence that every person in a democracy, even a slave, possesses an innate ability to act. Various essays illuminate Douglass's complex racial politics, deconstructing what seems at first to be his surprising aversion to racial pride, and others explore and critique concepts of masculinity, gender, and judgment in his oeuvre. The volume concludes with a discussion of Douglass's contributions to pre-- and post--Civil War jurisprudence.

This volume deals with the evidence from manuscripts and handwritten documents with multilingual and multigraphic structures in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Greek, conceived and designed to display texts in different languages or scripts, as well as addressing the historical context of these testimonia (their production, use and circulation) and focusing on problems inherent to multicultural societies.

The period of apartheid was a perilous time in South Africa’s history. This book examines the tactics of resistance developed by those working for the Weekly Mail and New Nation, two opposition newspapers published in South Africa in the mid- and late 1980s. The government, in an attempt to crack down on the massive political resistance sweeping the country, had imposed martial law and imposed even greater restrictions on the press. Bryan Trabold examines the writing, legal, and political strategies developed by those working for these newspapers to challenge the censorship restrictions as much as possible—without getting banned. Despite the many steps taken by the government to silence them, including detaining the editor of New Nation for two years and temporarily closing both newspapers, the Weekly Mail and New Nation not only continued to publish but actually increased their circulations and obtained strong domestic and international support. New Nation ceased publication in 1994 after South Africa made the transition to democracy, but the Weekly Mail, now the Mail & Guardian, continues to publish and remains one of South Africa’s most respected newspapers.

Elusive yet intuitive at the same time, the concept of collocation has attracted the attention of different branches of linguistics for many a year, owing to the proven pervasiveness of such combinations in languages. Although a universally accepted definition of collocation has not been reached as each attempted description is inextricably related to the linguist’s standpoint, the development of a series of very workable ideas on the nature of these combinations has led to the production of worthy linguistic commodities. While English lexicography has kept pace with the development in lexicology and corpus linguistics, Italian lexicography has only recently started to look in that direction. The author investigates the treatment of lexical collocations in the major bilingual English-Italian dictionaries, looking closely at the lexicographers’ choices while keeping the end users and their heuristics in mind.

Russell Kirk (1918--1994) is renowned worldwide as one of the founders of postwar American conservatism. His 1953 masterpiece, The Conservative Mind, became the intellectual touchstone for a reinvigorated movement and began a sea change in the nation's attitudes toward traditionalism. A prolific author and wise cultural critic, Kirk kept up a steady stream of correspondence with friends and colleagues around the globe, yet none of his substantial body of personal letters has ever been published -- letters as colorful and intelligent as the man himself. In Imaginative Conservatism, James E. Person Jr. presents one hundred and ninety of Kirk's most provocative and insightful missives. Covering a period from 1940 to 1994, these letters trace Kirk's development from a shy, precocious young man to a public intellectual firm in his beliefs and generous with his time and resources when called upon to provide for refugees, the homeless, and other outcasts. This carefully annotated and edited collection includes correspondence between Kirk and figures such as T.S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., Ray Bradbury, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Charlton Heston, Nikolai Tolstoy, Wendell Berry, Richard Nixon, and Herbert Hoover, among many others.Kirk's conservatism was not primarily political but moral and imaginative, focusing always on the relationship of the human soul in community with others and with the transcendent. Beyond the wealth of autobiographical information that this collection affords, it offers thought-provoking wisdom from one of the twentieth century's most influential interpreters of American politics and culture.

The first full-length study to treat both parts of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's foundational text Royal Commentaries of the Incas as a seminal work of political thought in the formation of the early Americas and the early-modern period. It is also among a handful of studies to explore the Commentaries as a "mestizo rhetoric," written to subtly address both native Andean readers and Hispano-Europeans.

The Once and Future Muse presents the first major study of the life and work of Dominican-born bilingual American poet and translator Rhina P. Espaillat (b. 1932). Beginning with her literary celebrity as the youngest poet ever inducted into the Poetry Society of America, it traces her relative obscurity after 1952 when she married and took on family and employment responsibilities, to her triumphant return to the poetry spotlight decades later when she reclaimed her former prestige with a series of award-winning poetry collections. The authors define Espaillat's place in American letters with attention to her formalist aesthetics, Hispanic Caribbean immigrant background, poetic community building, bilingual ethos, and domestically minded woman-of-color feminism. Addressing the temporality of her oeuvre—her publishing before and after the splitting of American literature into distinct ethnic segments—this work also highlights the demands that the social transformations of the 1960s placed on literary artists, critics, and readers alike.

Biography, Identity and Religion: Federicomaria Muccioli gives a useful brief history of divinisation in biographical writing and discusses Plutarch’s depiction of ruler cult in these terms; Daniel Harris-McCoy deals with accounts of dreams in biographical works and their influence on Artemidorus; Jennifer Rea compares the ways in which women are biographized, the early Christian martyr St. Perpetua, and the twentieth-century Christa McAuliffe, who lost her life in the Challenger disaster; Matthew Ferguson considers eschatological elements in the Alexander Romance, a late-antique highly fictionalized version of the life of Alexander the Great. Greek Lives under Roman rule: Alexei Zadorojnyi identifies the way in which very highly condensed ‘Lives’, for which he uses the term ‘biographical synecdoche’, serve interesting functions within biographical works; Andrew Scott writes about the tensions which arise in Cassius Dio from the fact that he was sometimes a participant in the history he relates; Svetla Slaveva-Griffin is also interested in the relation between biography and real life, and looks in great detail at how this is worked through in the tradition of NeoPlatonic biography.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Puerto Rico was swept by a wave of modernization, transforming the island from a predominantly rural society to an unquestionably urban one. A curious paradox ensued, however. While the island underwent rapid urbanization, and the rhetoric of economic development reigned over official discourses, the newly installed insular government, along with some academic circles and radio and television media, constructed, promoted, and sponsored a narrative of Puerto Rican culture based on rural subjects, practices, and spaces. By examining a wide range of cultural texts, but focusing on the film production of the Division of Community Education, the popular dance music of Cortijo y su combo, and the literary texts of Jose Luis Gonzalez and Rene Marques, Concrete and Countryside offers an in-depth analysis of how Puerto Ricans responded to this transformative period. It also shows how the arts used a battery of images of the urban and the rural to understand, negotiate, and critique the innumerable changes taking place on the island.

In Search of the Sacred Book studies the artistic incorporation of religious concepts such as prophecy, eternity, and the afterlife in the contemporary Latin American novel. It departs from sociopolitical readings by noting the continued relevance of religion in Latin American life and culture, despite modernity's powerful secularizing influence. Analyzing Jorge Luis Borges's secularized "narrative theology" in his essays and short stories, the book follows the development of the Latin American novel from the early twentieth century until today by examining the attempts of major novelists, from María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo, to Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and José Lezama Lima, to "sacralize" the novel by incorporating traits present in the sacred texts of many religions. It concludes with a view of the "desacralization" of the novel by more recent authors, from Elena Poniatowska and Fernando Vallejo to Roberto Bolaño.