Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age
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- ISBN 9781611179903
- Weight: 368g
- Dimensions: 160 x 231mm
- Publication Date: 18 Sep 2019
- Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Through archival study of instruction in the romantic letter genre, VanHaitsma challenges the normative scholarly focus on rhetorical education as preparing citizen Subjects for civic engagement. She theorizes a new concept of rhetorical education for romantic engagement--defined as instruction in Language practices for composing romantic relations--to prompt histories that account for the significant yet unrealized role that rhetorical training plays in inventing both civic and romantic life.
VanHaitsma's history of epistolary instruction in the nineteenth-century United States is grounded in examining popular manuals that taught the romantic letter genre; romantic correspondence of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, both freeborn African American women; and multigenre epistolary rhetoric by Yale student Albert Dodd. These case studies span rhetors who are diverse by gender, race, class, and educational background but who all developed creative ways of queering cultural norms and generic conventions in developing their same-sex romantic relationships. Ultimately, Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age argues that such rhetorical training shaped citizens as romantic Subjects in predictably heteronormative ways and simultaneously opened up possibilities for their queer rhetorical practices.
