Matt Cohen and Melinda DeStefano - Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, and: Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900 (review) - American Literature 76:4 American Literature 76.4 (2004) 891-894 Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. By Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen. Pittsburgh, Penn.: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press. 2002. xi, 279 pp. $34.95. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800–1900. By Paula Bernat Bennett. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2003. xvi, 264 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $22.50. 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...