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The temperance movement was the largest single organizing force for women in American history, uniting and empowering women seeking to enact social change. By the end of the century, more than two hundred thousand women had become members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and numerous others belonged to smaller temperance organizations. Despite the impact of the movement, its literature has been largely neglected.

In this collection of nineteen temperance tales, Carol Mattingly has recovered and revalued previously unavailable writing by women. Mattingly’s introduction provides a context for these stories, locating the pieces within the temperance movement as well as within larger issues in women’s studies.

The temperance movement was essential to women’s awareness of and efforts to change gender inequalities in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their fiction, temperance writers protested physical and emotional abuse at the hands of men, argued for women’s rights, addressed legal concerns, such as divorce and child custody, and denounced gender-biased decisions affecting the care and rights of children. Temperance fiction by women broadens our understanding of the connections between women’s rights and temperance, while shedding light on women’s thinking and behavior in the nineteenth century.

Shirley Wilson Logan analyzes the distinctive rhetorical features in the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women, concentrating on the public discourse of club and church women from 1880 until 1900.

Logan develops each chapter in this illustrated study around a feature of public address as best exemplified in the oratory of a particular woman speaker of the era. She analyzes not only speeches but also editorials, essays, and letters.

Logan first focuses on the prophetic oratory of Maria Stewart, the first American-born black woman to speak publicly. Turning to Frances Harper, she considers speeches that argue for common interests between divergent communities. And she demonstrates that central to the antilynching rhetoric of Ida Wells is the concept of "presence," or the tactic of enhancing certain selected elements of the presentation.

In her discussion of Fannie Barrier Williams and Anna Cooper, Logan shows that when speaking to white club women and black clergymen, both Williams and Cooper employ what Kenneth Burke called identification. To analyze the rhetoric of Victoria Matthews, she applies Carolyn Miller's modification of Lloyd Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation.

Logan also examines the discourse of women associated with the black Baptist women's movement and those participating in college-affiliated conferences.

The book includes an appendix with little-known speeches and essays by Anna Julia Cooper, Selena Sloan Butler, Lucy Wilmot Smith, Mary V. Cook, Adella Hunt Logan, Victoria Earle Matthews, Lucy C. Laney, and Georgia Swift King.

Where Writing Begins: A Postmodern Reconstruction is an innovative approach to the postmodern dilemma in rhetoric and composition thatoffers a positive and postmodern pedagogy that redefines and revalues writing and the teaching of writing through reconstructive, postmodern thought. The result is a fresh understanding of both the field of composition and writing instruction.

Drawing on the rich potential of “beginning” as a philosophical concept, Michael Carter asks the simple question: Where does writing begin? His findings take readers first to a new view of what it means to begin, and then to a new understanding of writing and teaching writing based on the redefined beginning. Challenging conventional notions that posit “beginning” as a chronological and temporal concept, he instead advocates an ontological and philosophical approach, in which “beginning” embodies both deconstruction and reconstruction—and the very possibility of newness.

Adding to a growing body of rhetorical scholarship in postmodern reconstruction, Where Writing Begins illustrates that writing must be understood within the framework of deconstruction and reconstruction. Writing, then, may be newly defined and valued as beginning. Weaving together conceptual, structural, and methodological patterns, Carter’s study is also a journey through the history of philosophy and rhetoric that will leave readers feeling refreshed and teachers eager to return to their classes.

When most people think of wikis, the first---and usually the only---thing that comes to mind is Wikipedia. The editors of Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom, Robert E. Cummings and Matt Barton, have assembled a collection of essays that challenges this common misconception, providing an engaging and helpful array of perspectives on the many pressing theoretical and practical issues that wikis raise. Written in an engaging and accessible manner that will appeal to specialists and novices alike, Wiki Writing draws on a wealth of practical classroom experiences with wikis to offer a series of richly detailed and concrete suggestions to help educators realize the potential of these new writing environments.

Robert E. Cummings began work at Columbus State University in August 2006 as Assistant Professor of English and Director of First-Year Composition. Currently he also serves as the Writing Specialist for CSU's Quality Enhancement Plan, assisting teachers across campus in their efforts to maximize student writing in their curriculum. He recently concluded a three-year research study with the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research and continues to research in the fields of computers and writing, writing across the curriculum, writing in the disciplines, and curricular reform in higher education.

Matt Barton is Assistant Professor, St. Cloud State University, Department of English-Rhetoric and Applied Writing Program. His research interests are rhetoric, new media, and computers and writing. He is the author of Dungeons and Desktops: A History of Computer Role-Playing Games and has published in the journals Text and Technology, Computers and Composition, Game Studies, and Kairos. He is currently serving as Associate Editor of Kairosnews and Managing Editor of Armchair Arcade.

"Wiki Writing will quickly become the standard resource for using wikis in the classroom."
---Jim Kalmbach, Illinois State University

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

Women Writing the Academy is based on an extensive interview study by Gesa E. Kirsch that investigates how women in different academic disciplines perceive and describe their experiences as writers in the university.

Kirsch’s study focuses on the writing strategies of successful women writers, their ways of establishing authority, and the kinds of audiences they address in different disciplinary settings. Based on multiple interviews with thirty-five women from five different disciplines (anthropology, education, history, nursing, and psychology) and four academic ranks (seniors, graduate students, and faculty before and after tenure), this is the first book to systematically explore the academic context in which women write and publish.

While there are many studies in literary criticism on women as writers of fiction, there has not been parallel scholarship on women as writers of professional discourse, be it inside or outside the academy. Through her research, for example, Kirsch found that women were less likely than their male counterparts to think of their work as sufficiently significant to write up and submit for publication, tended to hold on to their work longer than men before sending it out, and were less likely than men to revise and resubmit manuscripts that had been initially rejected.

This book is significant in that it investigates a new area of research— gender and writing—and in doing so brings together findings on audience, authority, and gender.

Writer’s block is more than a mere matter of discomfort and missed dead­lines; sustained experiences of writer’s block may influence academic success and career choices. Writers in the business world, profes­sional writers, and students all have known this most common and least studied problem with the composing process. Mike Rose, however, sees it as a limitable problem that can be precisely analyzed and remedied through instruc­tion and tutorial programs.

Rose defines writer’s block as “an in­ability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of skill or com­mitment,” which is measured by “pas­sage of time with limited productive involvement in the writing task.” He applies insights of cognitive psychology to reveal dimensions of the problem never before examined.

In his three-faceted approach, Rose de­velops and administers a questionnaire to identify writers experiencing both high and low degrees of blocking; through stimulated recall he examines the composing processes of these writers; and he proposes a cognitive conceptualization of writer’s block and of the composing process.

In drawing up his model, Rose delin­eates many cognitive errors that cause blocking, such as inflexible rules or con­flicting planning strategies. He also dis­cusses the practices and strategies that promote effective composition.

The reissue of this classic study of writer’s block includes a new preface by the author that advocates more mixed-methods research in rhetoric and composition, details how he conducted his writer’s block study, and discusses how his approach to a study like this would be different if conducted today.