Choice Review

Emanating from a 1992 seminar for college teachers, this volume collects the participants' inquiries into the rhetorical strategies and cultural work of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel. The book contains 12 essays--plus an introduction and an afterword--organized into four sections: Stowe's rhetorical strategies; domesticity and sentimentality as "discourse strategies" in Stowe's text; biblical and religious influences on the language and structure of Stowe's novel; representations of race and gender in Stowe's text and how they figure in history and in the current intellectual context. Some of the essays would have benefited from a more thorough search of recent scholarship (for example, the essay "Feminist Dialogics" cites Bakhtin and Irigaray but makes no mention of the many feminist critics who have, in the past decade, already sought to reconcile dialogism and feminism). Though not strikingly original, the contributions do sketch out a range of topics that are an appropriate introduction for undergraduates and graduate students who are just beginning the study of Stowe's rhetoric. R. R. Warhol; University of Vermont