The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies

The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies surveys the latest advances in rhetorical scholarship, synthesizing theories and practices across major areas of study in the field and pointing the way for future studies. Edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and Associate Editors Kirt H. Wilson and Rosa A. Eberly, the Handbook aims to introduce a new generation of students to rhetorical study and provide a deeply informed and ready resource for scholars currently working in the field.

Key Features:

• Brings together scholars from across the disciplines of Speech, Communication, English, and Writing Studies. While rhetoric is by definition interdisciplinary, self-identified scholars in the field are most often institutionally separated from one another. This Handbook bridges this divide by providing a refreshing range of transdisciplinary views on the nature, status, definition, and scope of rhetoric today.
• Offers a thorough-going overview of rhetorical studies today. Organized in four sections―Historical Studies in Rhetoric; Rhetoric Across the Disciplines; Rhetoric and Pedagogy, and Rhetoric and Public Discourse―the volume provides a single resource for engaging rhetorical studies.
• Underscores the importance of rhetoric to education across a wide range of disciplines as well as to effective participation in public arenas. Thus the volume connects rhetoric′s long teaching tradition to an activist agenda for informed civic engagement.
• Addresses methodological and theoretical difficulties and offers means of negotiating them.
• Provides one of the first introductions to rhetorical studies across cultures and to the related debates concerning comparative and contrastive rhetorics.

Andrea A. Lunsford is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and a member of the faculty of The Bread Loaf Graduate School of English. She has designed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses in writing history and theory, rhetoric, literacy studies, and intellectual property and is the author or co-author of many books and articles, including The Everyday Writer; Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse; Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing; Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the History of Rhetoric, Everything’s an Argument, Exploring Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies and Writing Matters: Rhetoric in Public and Private Lives.

Kirt Wilson’s research moves from African American to presidential rhetoric and from the history of rhetoric to the rhetoric of history. A graduate of Northwestern University, he is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies for the University of Minnesota’s Communication Studies Department. He has won numerous awards from the National Communication Association including the New Investigator Award (2001) and the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award (2002). His book The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate (2002) published by Michigan State Press won NCA’s Winans-Wichelns Memorial Award (2003) and the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award (2003). In 2004, the University of Minnesota honored professor Wilson with the prestigious McKnight Presidential Fellowship, an honor extended to only three to four tenured associate faculty each year. Kirt Wilson teaches graduate courses on U.S. public discourse, textual criticism and methods, African American civil rights rhetoric, and theories of race, culture, and public memory. Currently, he is working on two book projects. The first investigates the intellectual and conceptual history of “mimesis” or imitation in the nineteenth century and the second is a study of the sentimental aesthetic in contemporary commemorations of the civil rights movement.