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)

States that Angelina Grimke's 1835 letter to William Lloyd Garrison announced her entrance into public life and her work of moral reform. Suggests that the text represents rhetorically a display of commitments put at risk. "Reads" the text to demonstrate how Grimke construes violence into a source for the refashioning of self and…

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)