Eloquence Is Power

by Gustafson, Sandra M.

• ISBN13: 9780807825754
• ISBN10: 0807825751
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-08-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

Sandra Gustafson examines the verbal art of speech in sacred, political and diplomatic forms as it was created and practiced in colonial America and the early republic. She demonstrates that, in the distinctly American interaction of cultures, contact and conflict among Europeans, native Americans, and Africans gave particular significance and complexity to the uses of the spoken word.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
List of Illustrations	xi
Abbreviations	xii
Introduction	xiii
Prologue: Language and Power in Seventeenth-Century British America	1	(1)
Textual Possession and Oral Resistance	1	(11)
Renaissance Theories of Language and the Place of the Pulpit	12	(7)
Bodies of Language and the Gendered Social Body	19	(14)
Native Speech and the Discipline of Text	33	(7)
Gender in Performance	40	(35)
Evangelical Performance of Speech and Text	40	(11)
Women's Speech and Women's Silence in Jonathan Edwards's First Northampton Revival	51	(10)
The ``Feminine'' in Performance	61	(14)
The ``Savage'' Speaker Transformed	75	(36)
Cultural Hybridism in Evangelical Oratory	75	(3)
Competing Words	78	(12)
Samson Occom's Pentecostal Indian Speech	90	(11)
``Savage'' Speaker	101	(10)
John Marrant
Negotiating Power	111	(29)
Republicanism and the Eloquent Indian	111	(8)
Iroquois and American Publics	119	(21)
The Oratorical Public Culture of Revolutionary America	140	(31)
Medium and Message in Revolutionary Public Culture	140	(4)
Speech, Presence, and Representation	144	(14)
The Transformative Speech of Patrick Henry	158	(13)
The Body of the Nation	171	(29)
``Words of Reproach'' and ``Written Reason''	171	(13)
Authoritative Bodies	184	(16)
Forms of State	200	(33)
Documents and Debates	200	(13)
Performing the Presidency	213	(20)
Political Speech in the New Republic	233	(34)
Representative Speech	233	(13)
Figures of Difference	246	(21)
Conclusion	267	(4)
Appendix: Traditions of the Ancients	271	(8)
Index	279