Analyzes Edmund Burke's "Letter to a Noble Lord," noting that it not only reflects Burke's character, but also represents a significant example of the public letter as a rhetorical form and illustrates Burke's concern for the alignment of principle with public action. (MM)

Examines, rhetorically, the formal dynamics and internal action of an eighteenth-century political text by Edmund Burke, the "Letter to William Elliott, Esq." (1795). (SR)

Analyzes how John Dickinson's "Letter from a Farmer in Pennsylvania" appropriates pastoral design and convention for rhetorical ends. Explores how literary idiom lends its force of expression to meet the needs of public controversy and how rhetorical judgment is both insubstantiated in the argument and is its chief mode of appeal. (KEH)

Proposes satire as a form of argumentative practice. Examines eighteenth-century satirical attacks upon London's ubiquitous debating societies (formed among tradesmen, craftsmen, professionals, and small businessmen to "improve" themselves) as evidence of satire's public role in which the ideological struggle between social classes was…

Examines within Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" two representative orientations (reasons and experience) as indices of popular attitudes about the rhetorical arts during the eighteenth century. Argues that, as a satire on rhetorical pretensions and excess, this novel is an important document in the venerable battle between the…

Examines the 18th-century rhetorical convention of misogynist satire and how it shaped attitudes toward women speakers. Focuses not so much on the formal properties of the satire but on its convention and content as modes of insinuation. Surveys prominent journals, newspapers, magazines, and reviews of the period. (TB)