Speaking out: Oratory and the legacy of active virtue in American literature, 1800-1850.
Item
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Title
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Speaking out: Oratory and the legacy of active virtue in American literature, 1800-1850.
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Identifier
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AAI9830710
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identifier
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9830710
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Creator
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Ganter, Granville.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William Kelly
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | American Studies | Speech Communication
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a study of interpenetration of oratory and fiction in the first half of the nineteenth century. As scholars like Robert Ferguson have pointed out, the style of deliberative moral oratory typified by Daniel Webster slowly lost prestige to the growing authority of the technical expert, the professional conclusions of a bureaucrat. I argue, however, that American writers responded to this shift in cultural authority by incorporating strategies of moral oratory into their own work as a means of reasserting and revising the moral agency of American citizenship. Central to the project is an excavation of the concept of active virtue, an influential component of evangelical Calvinist preaching and republican civic practice.;My first chapter defines the eighteenth-century origins of active virtue in Common Sense philosophy and Edwardsian evangelism. My second chapter, a close study of an early American school anthology, The Columbian Orator (1797), defines the concept of active virtue as a literary, philosophical, and religious obligation. My third chapter examines the interconnections of Native and white rhetoric in James Fenimore Cooper's fiction, particularly in The Last of the Mohicans and The Redskins. My fourth chapter proposes new way of reading Emerson's essay "Circles" in terms of Emerson's interest in oratory. While "Circles" (1840-1) has been long understood as a rather skeptical meditation on the provisional nature of the products of "thought," I argue the essay is really a celebration of the evanescent moments of oratory and spoken discourse. I support this claim by connecting the essay's "circle" imagery to Thomas Hart Benton's attempt to "circle" the censure of President Jackson during the Expunging controversy. My fifth chapter analyzes the strategies of Frederick Douglass's oratory and his transmission of those techniques to his written prose, such as his novella, "The Heroic Slave." My final chapter explores the influence of women's rights oratory on the fiction of Sarah Josepha Hale and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
