Top Ten Books on Rhetoric

An intrepid student recently asked me, "I pose a request: If you can reduce rhetorics most relevant books to a list of ~5-10, I'd be willing to read them within a couple of years. I'll put the Western Canon and Classical Rhetoric & Its Christian & Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times already on the list." You might be able to tell by the quotation that I had discussed with the student those works he mentions by Harold Bloom and George A. Kennedy. Before I give you the list (which is the point, of course, of this blog post) I must say that, to me, the three canonical Rhetorical Theorists are Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Rhetoric, in the long view, may be a more Roman phenomenon than anything else. I believe, above all, Cicero is the center of the canon.

Therefore I neglected to mention any of these authors in my "top ten" list. As I believe I alluded to in my previous blog post, Wilbur Samuel Howell is the uncontested scholar of modern rhetoric. That is, he has documented better than anyone has (and better than anyone may ever be able to) the relationship between Rhetoric and Logic from the Middle Ages (starting from Alcuin) to the 19th century. Howell has a significant blind spot that precisely ends with Walter Pater and begins with his own life as a student of the Cornell Speech School. Howell taught us how rhetoric transmigrated from Quintilian and St. Augustine through Alcuin and the incredible turmoil that we call the English Renaissance, which, in rhetoric had its origins in France. Primarily the modern rhetorician is Peter Ramus, although his status is currently in question. I refer readers to scholarship on Peter Ramus, including that by Walter Ong.

In my judgment, the 19th century remains the most important and under-explored terrain in both the theory and history of rhetoric. No scholar has yet adequately communicated, for instance, how we get from Richard Whately to Kenneth Burke -- ok, I hear some protests. Kenneth Burke is not representative of the history and "true" tradition of rhetoric. That is, at least, W. S. Howell's opinion. As a devotee of Burke for now approaching 20 years, I am willing to allow that Burke does not meet Howell's criteria as a rhetorical critic. Aristotle conceived rhetoric, poetics, and logic as distinct disciplines -- as Howell demonstrates in his summary work from 1975.

So many of our current rhetoricians, however, are indebted to Kenneth Burke! Search the scholarship for yourself, let's say, beginning with Marie Hochmuth Nicols, L. Virginia Holland, and Leland M. Griffin in the 1950s and '60s. Now, this is where it gets a bit tricky and "disciplinary" in academic terms.

Howell convincingly (to me) points out that Kenneth Burke began as a literary critic. Howell himself establishes an absolutely coherent sense of rhetoric from the ancient tradition up through early Romanticism. Howell rejects Thomas De Quincey, and that may be Howell's limitation. Yet Howell praises Walter Pater's essay "Style," which gives us a window into Howell's modernity (despite itself). The tension between Burke and Howell may be definitive for 20th century rhetoric. Burke's claim to rhetoric is in his theory of the relationship between reader and audience (which Burke derived from the drama critic William Archer), but Howell points out that even poetry can be a mode of communication. That does not make it rhetoric.

To ask the question of Romanticism -- what happened in the 19th century to rhetoric? Is to open the most significant theoretical and practical questions in rhetoric possible today. From Howell's point of view, it would be the relationships and mutual contamination of poetic, rhetoric, and logic, but to a Romantic such as Thomas De Quincey it would be simply his own view of rhetoric, a kind of Roman histrionic exemplified in English by preachers such as John Donne: "[T]he first very eminent rhetorician in the English Literature is Donne" (ed. Burwick, p. 100). I cannot here delve into the rhetorical theory of De Quincey, but perhaps Hugh Blair was his precursor. And we still have yet to seriously track the influence of the many great 18th century rhetoricians-- Adam Smith, George Campbell, and Hugh Blair, among others-- on Romantic rhetorical theory and how it made its way through the deep conduit of "literature" or "belle lettres" -- to the early 20th century.

With this spirit and prerogative in mind I submitted to my student, who will surpass me many times even before I age, the following list:

1. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic (1975)

2. Medieval Eloquence, edited by James J. Murphy (1978)

3. Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380-1620 (2011)

4. Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian (Ramus), translated by Carole Newlands (1986)

5. The Philosophy of Rhetoric by George Campbell, edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer (1963)

6. Barbara Warnick, The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory And Its French Antecedents (1993)

7. Lois Peters Agnew, Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics (2008)

8. Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature, edited by Don H. Bialostosky and Lawrence D. Needham (1995)

9. Charles Sears Baldwin, Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic (1924)

10. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950)