Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
I wrote my dissertation in the late 1990s. it compared harriet beecher stowe and other antebellum sentimental women writers with professional male orators and rhetoricians. I argued that these women authors hadn't been writing in a rhetorical room of their own. Instead, they were solving problems that the professionals could not. While writing the dissertation, I asked a friend who was in my program to read my chapter on the most popular book in the nineteenth-century United States, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.