Using the primary lens of rhetorical criticism to examine eight literary narratives by American women writers from 1850-1900, this dissertation argues that the inclusion of arguments by narrators and characters regarding theories about naturalism is a feminist negotiation of contemporaneous social and scientific debates leading to rhetorical choices which mediate, hybridize, or refute specific aspects of deterministic theories; moreover, these negotiations of theories about naturalism lead to the conclusion that the authors expected to change readers attitudes or beliefs toward commonly held racial, gender, and class prejudices. The writers in this study, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Pauline Hopkins, Helen Hunt Jackson, Ellen Glasgow, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton are rarely associated with American literary naturalism; however, even though their texts would not be considered naturalistic novels (novels in which characters lives are determined by hereditary, economic, and social forces beyond control), their rhetorical approach to debating various kinds of determinism establishes these writers as precursors to or participants in the genre of American literary naturalism. In chapter one, I argue that Wilson and Jacobs negotiate naturalism in literary narratives for the rhetorical purpose of changing attitudes toward commonly held pseudo-scientific views of race. In chapter two, I demonstrate that Hopkins and Jackson theorize a balance among biological and social forces beyond ones control to put an end to cultural fears of hybridity. In chapter three, by examining physical, mental, and moral motivations, either naturally or socially located, Davis and Glasgow offer a view of social order built on moral responsibility or personal spirituality instead of a pure theory of hereditary, economic, or environmental determinism. Chapter four shows that Davis and Ruiz de Burton argue human natures aggression in the marketplace, although affected by heredity and economic forces beyond control, should still be mediated by moral standards.

When the Southern states began to secede from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, the South expected Kentucky to join them. The North also worked hard to keep Kentucky in the Union. The state originally took a stance of neutrality but in September 1861, chose to remain with the Union. Still, Kentuckians remained greatly divided over the matter. Many men from this Union state chose to go south and fight for the Confederacy, often against the wishes of their community, family, and friends. The war divided many families within the state and these soldiers often found themselves fighting against their cousins, fathers, brothers, and boyhood friend. This begs the question, why would these men go against their state and fight in the Confederate Army? This paper seeks to answer this question in the context of politics, personal beliefs, and desires for a different life.

There is a renewed exigence for scholars of rhetoric to examine how groups identify themselves by what they are not. I contend this exigence is present in deconversion narratives, narratives that articulate a loss of belief. I analyze two disparate conversion narratives in order to build upon Maurice Charland's theory of Constitutive Rhetoric. Books by Dan Barker, an ordained Christian Pastor, and William Lobdell, a journalist covering the religion beat serve as my texts. Barker's narrative serves as an example of a failed constitutive rhetoric, and I argue Barker's failures reemphasize the salience of Kenneth Burke's theory of identification to constitutive rhetoric. Barker's narrative serves as an example of a successful constitutive rhetoric, despite lacking Charland's ideological effects of constitutive rhetoric. I perform this analysis in order to give attention to a particular kind of identity constitution, one that is articulated primarily as a movement away from an ideology.

This thesis argues that Britain's new imperial ecology did not recognize the environmental reality of East Florida. The need to clear stubborn trees from the soil, drain large swamps, and expand acreage to encapsulate the meager amount of arable land favored those with large amounts of ready capital and the ability to wait on investments. This, by definition, precluded small- and medium-sized farm settlement, a risky venture in the best of times and areas. East Florida devolved into a rich man's gambit, favoring capital accumulation through natural resource and staple crop exploitation more than goods consumption. These capitalist programs had to contend with an Indian population that recognized its new assertiveness on the peninsula and disregarded the boundary line that the colonial administration had hoped would secure the colony. Rather than creating a colony full of consumers, the British enabled a system of tenuous colonial interaction between the administration, the nascent Seminoles, and the environment.

Using Fort Worth's 1936 celebration of the Texas State Centennial as a case study, this dissertation analyzes the way civic leaders and city boosters used the celebration as an opportunity to reinforce the city's western identity while proclaiming an image of modernity to fairgoers. Chapter one describes the origin of Fort Worth's bid to host a memorial celebration to the livestock industry as part of Texas's centennial festivities in 1936 and the efforts of city boosters to use the celebration to repackage the city's western identity and simultaneously promulgate its images as a modern metropolis. The second chapter describes the gradual disenchantment of West Texans with the eastern focus of state's centennial plans and their support for and participation in Fort Worth's celebration. Chapter three describes the early efforts of Frontier Centennial planners to develop "authentic" western attractions while omitting references to the city's southern heritage and the prominent role played by Fort Worth's club women in refining the celebration's commemorative message. The fourth chapter analyzes the circumstances which ultimately brought Rose to Fort Worth and his pitch to revamp Frontier Centennial plans. Chapter five describes Rose's sexualization of the celebration and explores the paradoxical role played by women during the Frontier Centennial. Finally, the sixth chapter demonstrates Rose's use of prevailing symbols of the mythic West in the creation of a "themed space" in the physical layout of the Frontier Centennial fair grounds.

Fascisms intellectual origins remain a difficult area of study, not least due to fascisms lack of a single originating author. The challenge historians face lies in identifying those pre-fascist intellectuals who contributed to fascisms ideology. Yet, the risk of misidentifying a proto-fascist continues to plague historians. This paper focuses on both the historians of fascism and the fin-de-siècle era that spawned fascism. By examining the works of supposed pre-fascist intellectuals, this paper seeks to identify how the use of certain pre-fascist intellectuals has influenced the common understanding of fascist ideology. Using both the methods of cultural history and Ludwig Wittgensteins meaning-as-use theory of language, this paper hopes to better delineate between those who did and those who did not have a direct influence on fascism.

This project calls for and offers the beginnings of a new and substantially different translation of Aristotles dissertation, the Rhetoric. My undertaking is neither to offer just another translation nor to invent one more new rhetoric; but it is to recover very old discourses that may predate Aristotle, means of communication that he intends to suppress. These are the discourses (1) of women, (2) of wordsmiths, and (3) of weavers of ideas from one mother tongue into another. In more contemporary terms, they are (1) feminisms, (2) rhetorics, and (3) translations. The approaches that the project borrows from most are Jacqueline Jones Roysters afrafeminism, Krista Ratcliffes rhetorical listening, and Kenneth Pikes tagmemics. I have coined the phrase feministic rhetorical translating as a combination of feminist, rhetorical, and translational methods to expose Aristotles suppressive aims. Traditional translators of Aristotles texts have been ostensibly faithful to Aristotles authorial intention. Thus, classicists have brought into English the linguistic and philological aims of this writer of various treatises; philosophers have rendered into our language his epistemic and logical goals; and some rhetoricians have translated the Rhetoric as if Aristotle really intended to be rhetorical (assuming that his treatise is the definitive canonical statement on rhetoric and what it is to be rhetorical). Likewise, while recognizing Aristotles intentions as sexist, absolutist, and elitist (or phallogocentric), some feminist scholars ironically mirror phallogocentrism in their own absolute, gender-based opposition to his text. In contrast, a feminist rhetorical translating of Aristotles central text on rhetoric demonstrates that Hellene discourse is womanly, is full of wordplay, and is richly translational even when Aristotle might intend it to be otherwise. This project, then, refuses the limited choice of either (1) the reception of the Rhetoric on the authors own terms albeit as imagined by the translator or (2) the rejection of his work, a rejection as suppressive as Aristotles. A feminist rhetorical translating, rather, embraces the agency of a translator who would recognize the prejudices of Aristotle and yet would render these biases from her own perspectives, in her own language, in order to rectify them by her own intentions.

This dissertation focuses on the journal-letter form as it is utilized by four middle-class women in colonial and early America. Admittedly, a text that is both letter and diary is also, ironically, neither wholly letter nor wholly diary, and thus fails to fit into traditionally recognized categories of autobiographical writing. This difficulty of classification is reflected in current diary and letter scholarship in two primary ways: either the journal-letter is excluded from studies of diaries or letters because of its distinctiveness or its distinctiveness is ignored in the interest of inclusion. On the contrary, my study highlights hybridity as the defining characteristic of the journal-letter, and I read the simultaneous presence of epistolary and diary elements within the form as illustrative of the creativity and adaptive ability of its writers. The study begins in 1754, the moment when the concept of the journal-letter was popularized by published travel accounts and the epistolary fiction of Samuel Richardson. It ends in 1836 at the beginning of the mass migrations that inspired thousands of emigrants to write and preserve their experiences in the journal-letter form. I have attempted to chart a preliminary history of the journal-letters development through the examples of four intriguing women: Esther Edwards Burr, Anna Green Winslow, Mary Jackson Lee, and Narcissa Prentiss Whitman. Drawing on such scholars as Janet Gurkin Altman, Eve Tavor Bannet, and Jennifer Sinor, I show how women joined these two forms of writing into a single text in order to make meaning out of their existence, maintain and strengthen personal relationships, continue their education, and examine and construct the self. Through their texts, the journal-letter emerges as anything but a static form. It is, indeed a product of the mediums of writing historically and culturally available to and associated with women at a particular moment in time, but it is also highly adaptable to the purposes and needs of individual writers. Ultimately, these everyday epistles test the boundaries of diary and letter writing, offering a unique medium for writing the self in the presence of others.

As a result of continuing and fruitful recovery and integration of women's voices into the study of rhetoric, there is a newly burgeoning exigence for scholars to undertake the next steps towards normalizing the study of women's rhetorics in the discipline. Much as new teachers of composition have need of "hands-on" material, so too do the new teachers of women's rhetorics. There is a definitive gap in the scholarship of how best to teach a women's rhetorics class, which this thesis intends to fill. Additionally, scholars have declared a need for strategic contemplation of our approaches to research, teaching, and scholarship, and this thesis works to argue in favor of that as well as to engage practically in it.

Matilda Fulton (1803-1879), an elite woman from Maryland, moved to the Arkansas frontier with her husband William Fulton in 1826. William Fulton served as the last territorial governor and became a senator in the first election after Arkansas reached statehood. During the absence of her husband, Matilda Fulton's letters to friends and family members documented her fascinating and extraordinary experience as a woman running a household and plantation in early Arkansas. Nineteenth century American society had very specific ideas about the appropriate behavior of women and their place in society. Magazines and pamphlets described the virtues ti which women should aspire, and the idea of separate spheres relegated women to the private sphere of the home because they were too pure to be tainted by the public world of men. The themes of domesticity and separate spheres restricted the lives of women and the behavior they could engage in. \nAs a member of the upper class in Maryland, Matilda had been raised in a society that believed a woman's appropriate place was in the home as a member of the private sphere. When she and her family settled in territorial Arkansas, Matilda became part of a frontier society that, despite its rustic nature, still embraced a limited view of appropriate behavior for "ladies." While society dictated acceptable activities for women, Matilda Fulton was left in the absence of her husband to step out of those acceptable roles and take on new ones. Since William Fulton was away from Rosewood, the Fulton plantation, for months at a time, Matilda Fulton found herself taking care of the children, finances, farm, slaves, and business deals. Very few married women in Arkansas at this time lived apart from their husbands, and even fewer faced the responsibilities taken on by Matilda Fulton. Fulton became part of the public sphere as she negotiated purchases of livestock and slaves and sales of crops and produce, discussed politics, and gave financial advice to her husband. At the same time she took on jobs such as slave supervisor and crop planner that were traditionally done by men, Matilda continued to serve in her domestic role, caring for the children and running the household. Her ability to fulfill duties that society viewed as the work of men and successfully manage a plantation challenged the idea of the women's sphere and what society deemed as acceptable for women at this time.