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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until April 25, 2026

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Rhetorical Power and Purpose in Nineteenth-Century Everyday Writing

Frankel, Katherine
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1712914993375487

Abstract Details

2024, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences: English.
Rhetorical Power and Purpose in Nineteenth-Century Everyday Writing is a historical study of how three different nineteenth-century communities—middle-upper to upper-class white men and women, formerly enslaved men, and rural, working-class children—used everyday writing in rhetorically meaningful and powerful ways. I define “everyday writers” as people who engaged in writing practices for non-professional reasons. The examination of these everyday writers will help to broaden the understanding of how and why people wrote in the nineteenth-century, how different writing genres were used, and how writing became rhetorically consequential. Drawing from archival research from Colonial Williamsburg, the College of William and Mary, Eastern Kentucky University, the University of Iowa, and Documenting the American South, I rely on textual analysis to examine three different groupings of historical texts. In Chapter One, I use rhetorical genre theory to analyze what type of content three Kentucky enslavement narratives contained and to understand what type of social action the authors accomplished through writing the narratives. In Chapter Two, affect theory and new materialism frame my examination of personal letters that acted as facilitators of affective experiences through both text and tactility. In Chapter Three, as I analyze diary entries from four different rural, working-class children, I consider lifespan writing research as a method for examining historical texts. Lastly, in my conclusion, I make an argument for why archival research is necessary for writing studies and present four different reasons that a historical understanding of writing can be pedagogically advantageous when integrated into the writing classroom. My intention in studying nineteenth-century everyday writers is not only to build a fuller narrative of nineteenth-century writing, but also to extend that knowledge into the present in ways that are beneficial to studies of present-day composing and composition pedagogy.
Samantha Necamp, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Christopher Carter, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Laura Micciche, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
195 p.
Rhetoric
composition; writing studies; histories of composing; archival research; nineteenth century; literacy

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Frankel, K. (2024). Rhetorical Power and Purpose in Nineteenth-Century Everyday Writing [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1712914993375487

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Frankel, Katherine. Rhetorical Power and Purpose in Nineteenth-Century Everyday Writing. 2024. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1712914993375487.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Frankel, Katherine. "Rhetorical Power and Purpose in Nineteenth-Century Everyday Writing." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2024. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1712914993375487

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1712914993375487
© 2024, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Rhetorical Power and Purpose in Nineteenth-Century Everyday Writing by Katherine Frankel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.