Imagining Rhetoric and Poets in the Public Sphere engage debates about the putative public sphere in the nineteenth century and the role of gender in shaping it. Surveying understudied realms of literary practice and publication, the authors argue that such circuits were key to the mediation of subjectivity and objectivity that constituted the public sphere, which included women who had, in the words of one of Eldred and Mortensen's subjects, "dangerous gifts" (166).

Eldred and Mortensen trace what they term "liberatory civil rhetoric" in the antebellum United States through its expression in "women's rhetorical education and composing practices" (1). They define "liberatory civil rhetoric" in relation to neoclassical norms and to what they see as republican notions of effecting political change "by revealing public consensus" (2). Women's education was not framed hegemonically by republican motherhood but was a debate carried out among teachers, activists, and novelists, many of them women who energized a public sphere while arguing against women's participation in it. Although academies in the mid-nineteenth century "continued to ready girls to participate in civic affairs, the opportunities for actual participation grew fewer and more tightly regulated" (25). As one rhetorician put it, the "legacy of home life is indelible and can never be rewritten by even the best schooling"; therefore, "efforts to reform adult society should be directed to that fundamental place of learning, the home" (90).

Chapters on Judith Sargent Murray and African American abolitionist Charlotte Forten offer especially fascinating tactics for reading schooling texts. Eldred and Mortensen see Murray's The Gleaner (1798) as theorizing a "commonplace rhetoric." Steering a course between dangerously creative women's expression and the necessity of an informed, self-regulating female populace, Murray advocated "a system of selecting, arranging, and delivering commentaries on familiar topics aimed at producing an 'original version' and . . . an instructive effect" (77). Forten, too, usefully complicated the trajectory of liberatory civic rhetoric. Eldred and Mortensen read her journals from boarding school in Massachusetts and teaching in South Carolina as embarking on "a quest to fashion a rhetoric that sanctions the articulation of strong emotions such as hatred, emotions that white rhetors considered distasteful in view of contemporary belletristic standards and illogical according to the conventions of neoclassical civic expression" (197).

A sustained treatment of ethnicity and race might have opened up more examples of tension-ridden negotiations of rhetorical possibility. Native Americans, for example, are ghosts in the critical machinery, appearing in antebellum student compositions, schooling fictions, and curricula. If the authors had situated their mostly white, middle-class, women writers in the larger fabric of U.S. debates about Indian education, the transition to an industrial economy, scientific racism, and immigration and contagion, they would have cast into higher relief the stakes of rhetorical form.

Poets in the Public Sphere uses nineteenth-century women's newspaper and periodical poetry to tackle more directly the question of the Habermasian public sphere and "everyday communicative practice." Extending Jane Tompkins's work on sentimentality, Bennett suggests that these poems exceed aesthetic and personal value. Women's mimetic use and occasional rejection of mainstream literary structures questioned national policy and racial and ethnic ideologies to "demand, model, imagine, produce, and defend reforms that ultimately led to their acquisition of civil free agency" (10). Bennett introduces the term "affective irony" to name an "antisentimentality" that develops in these poets' work by the middle of the nineteenth century. Cloaked in the disguise of mainstream...