This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives Licence and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. This book demonstrates the central role played by the stylistic features of online news in constructing meaning and shaping cultural representations of people and places - in particular, France and Muslims/Islam. Taking the 2016 violent attack in Nice, France as a case study, Ashley Riggs analyses online news coverage of the attack from the UK, Spain, and Switzerland, three distinct linguistic and cultural spaces. An innovative mixed-methods approach, including content analysis and elements of translation criticism and comparative stylistics, is used to analyse this corpus, revealing the frequency and influence of stylistic devices found in online news and exploring how they help to shape reader interpretations. Drawing conclusions about journalistic practices by place and interrogating the notions of 'European identity' and 'European journalism', Stylistic Deceptions in Online News reveals how stylistic features may vary according to both political leanings and national and regional contexts, and the influence these features have upon readers.

This book analyses diverse public discourses to investigate how wealth inequality has been portrayed in the British media from the time of the Second World War to the present day. Using a variety of corpus-assisted methods of discourse analysis, chapters present an historicized perspective on how the mass media have helped to make sharply increased wealth inequality seem perfectly normal. Print, radio and online media sources are interrogated using methodologies grounded in critical discourse analysis, critical stylistics and corpus linguistics in order to examine the influence of the media on the British electorate, who have passively consented to the emergence of an even less egalitarian Britain. Covering topics such as Second World War propaganda, the 'Change4Life' anti-obesity campaign and newspaper, parliamentary and TV news programme attitudes to poverty and austerity, this book will be of value to all those interested in the mass media's contribution to the entrenched inequality in modern Britain.

This book builds on cognitive stylistics, humour studies and psychological approaches to literature and film to explore the emotional aspects of humorous narrative comprehension. It investigates how the linguistic features of comic novels and short stories (by, for example, Douglas Adams, Joseph Heller and Nick Hornby) can shape readers' experience of comedy, considering the ways in which moods, characters and the plot is used to trigger blends of positive and negative emotion. The book offers an approach to such features of comedy as dark humour, cringe humour and comic suspense, emphasising the relationship between humorous language and mental states which are typically considered serious. Agnes Marszalek's focus on the non-humorous side of experiencing comedy offers a key contribution to the study of humorous narratives. By investigating humour as part of a narrative world, this book moves towards addressing the complexity of the experience of humour in narrative texts, providing implications not only for the linguistics of humour, but also for those approaches to discourse comprehension which explore the affective side of engaging with texts.

What occurs within coma? What does the coma patient experience? How does the patient perceive the world outside of coma, if at all? The simple answer to these questions is that we don't know. Yet the sheer volume of literary and media texts would have us believe that we do. Examining representations of coma and brain injury across a variety of texts, this book investigates common tropes and linguistic devices used to portray the medical condition of coma, giving rise to universal mythologies and misconceptions in the public domain. Matthew Colbeck looks at how these texts represent, or fail to represent, long-term brain injury, drawing on narratives of coma survivors that have been produced and curated through writing groups he has run over the last 10 years. Discussing a diverse range of cultural works, including novels by Irvine Welsh, Stephen King, Tom McCarthy and Douglas Coupland, as well as film and media texts such as The Sopranos, Kill Bill, Coma and The Walking Dead, Colbeck provides an explanation for our fascination with coma. With a proliferation of misleading stories of survival in the media and in literature, this book explores the potential impact these have upon our own understanding of coma and its victims.

Disruptive pedagogies for archival research In a cultural moment when institutional repositories carry valuable secrets to the present and past, this collection argues for the critical, intellectual, and social value of archival instruction. Graban and Hayden and 37 other contributors examine how undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, history, community literacy, and professional writing can successfully engage students in archival research in its many forms, and successfully model mutually beneficial relationships between archivists, instructors, and community organizations.Combining new and established voices from related fields, each of the book's three sections includes a range of form-disrupting pedagogies. Section I focuses on how approaching the archive primarily as textfosters habits of mind essential for creating and using archives, for critiquing or inventing knowledge-making practices, and for being good stewards of private and public collections. Section II argues for conducting archival projects as collaboration through experiential learning and for developing a preservationist consciousness through disciplined research. Section III details praxis for revealing, critiquing, and intervening in historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives in which we all work. Ultimately, contributors explore archives as sites of activism while also raising important questions that persist in rhetoric and composition scholarship, such as how to decolonize research methodologies, how to conduct teaching and research that promote social justice, and how to shift archival consciousness toward more engaged notions of democracy. This collection highlights innovative classroom and curricular course models for teaching with and through the archives in rhetoric and composition and beyond.

A collection of essays providing insights into new directions in rhetorical history Kathleen J. Turner's 1998 multicontributor volume Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases quickly became a foundational text in the field, and the studies in the book have served as an important roadmap for scholars undertaking such scholarship. In the decades since its publication, developments in rhetorical-historical research, engaged scholarship, and academic interventionism have changed the practice of rhetoric history tremendously. To address this shift, Turner and Jason Edward Black have edited a much-anticipated follow-up volume: Reframing Rhetorical History: Cases, Theories, and Methodologies, which reassesses both history as rhetoric and rhetorical history as practice. This new book attends to a number of topics that have become not just hot-button issues in rhetorical scholarship but have entrenched themselves as anchors within the field. These include digital rhetoric, public memory, race and ethnicity, gender dynamics and sexualities, health and well-being, transnationalism and globalization, social justice, archival methods and politics, and colonialism and decoloniality. The sixteen essays are divided into four major parts: "Digital Humanities and Culture" introduces methods and cases using twenty-first century technologies; "Identities, Cultures, and Archives" addresses race and gender within the contexts of critical race theory, gendered health rhetoric, race-based public memory, and class/sectionalism; "Approaches to Nationalism and Transnationalism" explores ideologies related to US and international cultures; and "Metahistories and Pedagogies" explores creative ways to approach the frame of metarhetorical history given what the field has learned since the publication of Doing Rhetorical History. CONTRIBUTORS Andrew D. Barnes / Jason Edward Black / Bryan Crable / Adrienne E. Hacker Daniels / Matthew deTar / Margaret Franz / Joe Edward Hatfield / J. Michael Hogan / Andre E. Johnson / Madison A. Krall / Melody Lehn / Lisbeth A. Lipari / Chandra A. Maldonado / Roseann M. Mandziuk / Christina L. Moss / Christopher J. Oldenburg / Sean Patrick O'Rourke / Daniel P. Overton / Shawn J. Parry-Giles / Philip Perdue / Kathleen J. Turner

Nearly sixty years after Freedom Summer, its events-especially the lynching of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner-stand out as a critical episode of the civil rights movement. The infamous deaths of these activists dominate not just the history but also the public memory of the Mississippi Summer Project. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, movement veterans challenged this central narrative with the shocking claim that during the search for Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the FBI and other law enforcement personnel discovered many unidentified Black bodies in Mississippi's swamps, rivers, and bayous. This claim has evolved in subsequent years as activists, journalists, filmmakers, and scholars have continued to repeat it, and the number of supposed Black bodies-never identified-has grown from five to more than two dozen. In Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer, author Davis W. Houck sets out to answer two questions: Were Black bodies discovered that summer? And why has the shocking claim only grown in the past several decades-despite evidence to the contrary? In other words, what rhetorical work does the Black bodies claim do, and with what audiences? Houck's story begins in the murky backwaters of the Mississippi River and the discovery of the bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, murdered on May 2, 1964, by the Ku Klux Klan. He pivots next to the Council of Federated Organization's voter registration efforts in Mississippi leading up to Freedom Summer. He considers the extent to which violence generally and expectations about interracial violence, in particular, serves as a critical context for the strategy and rhetoric of the Summer Project. Houck then interrogates the unnamed-Black-bodies claim from a historical and rhetorical perspective, illustrating that the historicity of the bodies in question is perhaps less the point than the critique of who we remember from that summer and how we remember them. Houck examines how different memory texts-filmic, landscape, presidential speech, and museums-function both to bolster and question the centrality of murdered white men in the legacy of Freedom Summer.

Winner of the 2021 New Voices Book Award by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Exploring the ways in which the development of linguistic practices helped expand national politics in remote, rural areas of Venezuela, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta situates language as a mediating force in the creation of the 'magical state'. Focusing on the Waraos speakers of the Orinoco Delta, this book explores center-periphery dynamics in Venezuela through an innovative linguistic anthropological lens. Using a semiotic framework informed by concepts of 'transduction' and 'translation', this book combines ethnographic and historical evidence to analyze the ideological mediation and linguistic practices involved in managing a multi-ethnic citizenry in Venezuela. Juan Luis Rodriguez shows how indigenous populations participate in the formation and contestation of state power through daily practices and the use of different speech genres, emphasising the performative and semiotic work required to produce revolutionary subjects. Establishing the centrality of language and semiosis in the constitution of authority and political power, this book moves away from seeing revolution in solely economic or ideological terms. Through the collision between Warao and Spanish, it highlights how language ideologies can exclude or integrate indigenous populations in the public sphere and how they were transformed by Hugo Chavez' revolutionary government to promote loyalty to the regime.

Nearly sixty years after Freedom Summer, its events-especially the lynching of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner-stand out as a critical episode of the civil rights movement. The infamous deaths of these activists dominate not just the history but also the public memory of the Mississippi Summer Project. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, movement veterans challenged this central narrative with the shocking claim that during the search for Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the FBI and other law enforcement personnel discovered many unidentified Black bodies in Mississippi's swamps, rivers, and bayous. This claim has evolved in subsequent years as activists, journalists, filmmakers, and scholars have continued to repeat it, and the number of supposed Black bodies-never identified-has grown from five to more than two dozen. In Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer, author Davis W. Houck sets out to answer two questions: Were Black bodies discovered that summer? And why has the shocking claim only grown in the past several decades-despite evidence to the contrary? In other words, what rhetorical work does the Black bodies claim do, and with what audiences? Houck's story begins in the murky backwaters of the Mississippi River and the discovery of the bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, murdered on May 2, 1964, by the Ku Klux Klan. He pivots next to the Council of Federated Organization's voter registration efforts in Mississippi leading up to Freedom Summer. He considers the extent to which violence generally and expectations about interracial violence, in particular, serves as a critical context for the strategy and rhetoric of the Summer Project. Houck then interrogates the unnamed-Black-bodies claim from a historical and rhetorical perspective, illustrating that the historicity of the bodies in question is perhaps less the point than the critique of who we remember from that summer and how we remember them. Houck examines how different memory texts-filmic, landscape, presidential speech, and museums-function both to bolster and question the centrality of murdered white men in the legacy of Freedom Summer.

Exploring multimodality in English language teaching textbooks, this book focusses on how language and image are co-deployed within these resources in order to create and convey interpersonal meaning. Presenting cutting-edge research in appraisal studies and multimodal discourse analysis, Yumin Chen uses systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics to investigate how different voices are introduced and aligned inter-modally in textbooks, extending the appraisal systems of engagement and graduation across language and image. The book also demonstrates how linguistic and visual semiotic resources co-instantiate attitude, paying special attention to the attitudinal dimension of curriculum goals for school students of different ages. Furthermore, it examines how different kinds of coding orientation are deployed in various educational contexts and different constituent genres. Demonstrating how the linguistic and semiotic theories can be adapted to analyze multimodal texts across language and image, Interpersonal Meaning in Multimodal English Textbooks offers new perspectives on how to employ multimodal resources to enhance the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language.

Exploring the ways in which language and conflict are intertwined and interrelated, this volume examines the patterns of public discourse in Ukraine and Russia since the beginning of the Ukrainian Crisis in 2014. It investigates the trends in language aggression, evaluation, persuasion and other elements of conflict communication related to the situation. Through the analysis of the linguistic features of salient discourses and prevalent narratives constructed by different social groups, Language of Conflict reflects competing worldviews of various stakeholders in this conflict and presents multiple, often contradictory, visions of the circumstances. Contributors from Ukraine, Russia and beyond investigate discursive representations of the most important aspects of the crisis: its causes and goals, participants and the values and ideologies of the opposing factions. They focus on categorization, stance, framing, (de)legitimation, manipulation and coping strategies while analysing the ways in which the stress produced by social discord, economic hardship, and violence shapes public discourse. Primarily focusing on informal communication and material gathered from online sources, the collection provides insight into the ways people directly affected by the crisis think about and respond to it. The volume acknowledges the communicators' active role in constructing the (often incompatible) discursive images of the conflict and concentrates on the conscious and strategic use of linguistic resources in negative and aggressive communication.

What is suicide? When does suicide start and when does it end? Who is involved? Examining narratives of suicide through a discourse analytic framework, Discursive Constructions of the Suicidal Process demonstrates how linguistic theories and methodologies can help answer these questions and cast light upon what suicide involves and means, both for those who commit an act and their loved ones. Engaging in close analysis of suicide letters written before the act and post-hoc narratives from after the event, this book is the first qualitative study to view suicide not as a single event outside time, but as a time-extended process. Exploring how suicide is experienced and narrated from two temporal perspectives, Dariusz Galasinski and Justyna Ziolkowska introduce discourse analysis to the field of suicidology. Arguing that studying suicide narratives and the reality they represent can add significantly to our understanding of the process, and in particular its experiences and meanings, Discursive Constructions of the Suicidal Process demonstrates the value of discourse analytic insights in informing, enriching and contextualising our knowledge of suicide.

A foundational text of twenty-first-century rhetorical studies, Vernacular Voices addresses the role of citizen voices in steering a democracy through an examination of the rhetoric of publics. Gerard A. Hauser maintains that the interaction between everyday and official discourse discloses how active members of a complex society discover and clarify their shared interests and engage in exchanges that shape their opinions on issues of common interest.In the two decades since Vernacular Voices was first published, much has changed: in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US presidents have increasingly taken unilateral power to act; the internet and new media have blossomed; and globalization has raised challenges to the autonomy of nation states. In a new preface, Hauser shows how, in an era of shared, global crises, we understand publics, how public spheres form and function, and the possibilities for vernacular expressions of public opinion lie at the core of lived democracy. A foreword is provided by Phaedra C. Pezzullo, associate professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A rhetorical examination of the rise of populist conservatism. I The People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States examines a variety of texts-ranging from speeches and campaign advertisements to news reports and political pamphlets-to outline the populist character of conservatism in the United States. Paul Elliott Johnson focuses on key inflection points in the development of populist conservatism, including its manifestation in the racially charged presidential election of 1964, its consolidation at the height of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign in 1984, and its character in successive moments that saw its fortunes wax and wane, including 1994, the Obama era, and the rise of Donald J. Trump. theorizing conservative populism as a rhetorical form, Johnson advances scholarship about populism away from a binary ideological framework while offering a useful lens for contextualizing scholarship on American conservatism. I The People emphasizes that the populist roots of conservative hegemony exercise a powerful constraining force on conservative intellectuals, whose power to shape and control the movement to which they belong is circumscribed by the form of its public-facing appeals. The study also reframes scholarly understandings of the conservative tradition's seeming multiplicity, especially the tendency to suggest an abiding conservative unease regarding capitalism, showing how racist hostility underwrote a compromise with an increasingly economized understanding of humanity. Johnson also contests the narrative that conservatives learned to practice identity politics from social progressives. From the beginning, conservatism's public vernacular was a white and masculine identity politics reliant on a rhetoric of victimhood, whether critiquing the liberal Cold War consensus or President Barack Obama.

**Shortlisted for the 2021 BAAL Book Prize for an outstanding book in the field of Applied Linguistics** Situated at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication, Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health provides insights into the linguistic practices of members of three online support communities as they describe their experiences of living with and managing different mental health problems, including anorexia nervosa, depression and diabulimia. In examining contemporary health communication data, the book combines quantitative corpus linguistic methods with qualitative discourse analysis that draws upon recent theoretical insights from critical health sociology. Using this mixed-methods approach, the analysis identifies patterns and consistencies in the language used by people experiencing psychological distress and their role in realising varying representations of mental illness, diagnosis and treatment. Far from being neutral accounts of suffering and treating illness, corpus analysis illustrates that these interactions are suffused with moral and ideological tensions sufferers seek to collectively negotiate responsibility for the onset and treatment of recalcitrant mental health problems. Integrating corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and health sociology, this book showcases the capacity of linguistic analysis for understanding mental health discourse as well as critically exploring the potential of corpus linguistics to offer an evidence-based approach to health communication research.

Southern rhetoric is communication's oldest regional study. During its initial invention, the discipline was founded to justify the study of rhetoric in a field of white male scholars analyzing significant speeches by other white men, yielding research that added to myths of Lost Cause ideology and a uniquely oratorical culture. Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric takes on the much-overdue task of reconstructing the way southern rhetoric has been viewed and critiqued within the communication discipline. The collection reveals that southern rhetoric is fluid and migrates beyond geography, is constructed in weak counterpublic formation against legitimated power, creates a region that is not monolithic, and warrants activism and healing. Contributors to the volume examine such topics as political campaign strategies, memorial and museum experiences, television and music influences, commemoration protests, and ethnographic experiences in the South. The essays cohesively illustrate southern identity as manifested in various contexts and ways, considering what it means to be a part of a region riddled with slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other expressions of racial and cultural hierarchy. Ultimately, the volume initiates a new conversation, asking what would southern rhetorical critique be like if it included the richness of the southern culture from which it came? Contributions by Whitney Jordan Adams, Wendy Atkins-Sayre, Jason Edward Black, Patricia G. Davis, Cassidy D. Ellis, Megan Fitzmaurice, Michael L. Forst, Jeremy R. Grossman, Cynthia P. King, Julia M. Medhurst, Ryan Neville-Shepard, Jonathan M. Smith, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Dave Tell, and Carolyn Walcott.

Engaged Persuasion in a Post-Truth World provides an innovative approach to inspire students' interest in persuasive communication in today's ever-evolving world. The book moves beyond theory and addresses new media, engaged citizenship, and deconstructing messages in a post-truth world to deepen students' exploration of persuasion. This multi-disciplinary, research-driven textbook highlights contemporary studies in persuasion. It covers the dynamics of persuasion, including important source, receiver, and message components while also exploring the effects of persuasive communication on receivers' attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors. Students examine the application of persuasive communication concepts and theories to their lives in multiple contemporary contexts, such as campus, residence, workplace, classroom, and online communities. Unique themes explored in the book include the application of contemporary persuasion theory and research to the post-truth era, the influence of new media on persuasive communication, and how students can use persuasion to become civically engaged and advance the common good. A highly relevant and wholly original approach, Engaged Persuasion in a Post-Truth World is an exemplary text for courses in persuasive communication.

Critical and Creative Thinking is a vital resource that expands how we think and employ the basic skills involved in the identification and evaluation of an argument. It provides a basic foundation for teaching and learning critical and creative thinking. The text provides readers with the fundamental skills they need to approach ideas and opinions on current social issues. The selected readings have been carefully chosen for their ability to bring a wide range of perspectives and importance to the critical and creative thinking approach in the text. The first section explores approaches to critical and creative thinking, followed by readings for application, and then additional learning activities and resources. Specific topics include gender, education, race and immigration, inequality, and family. This new edition includes updated content and activities, as well as new and relevant readings that deal with current day issues (e.g., online learning and microaggressions). Critical and Creative Thinking is an ideal primary text for courses in critical thinking, social problems, social work, and sociology. It can also serve as a supplementary text for English courses, especially those with emphasis on critical and creative thinking.

Women at Work presents the field of rhetorical studies with fifteen chapters that center on gender, rhetoric, and work in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist scholars explore women's labor evangelism in the textile industry, the rhetorical constructions of leadership within women's trade unions, the rhetorical branding of a twentieth-century female athlete, the labor activism of an African American blues singer, and the romantic, same-sex collaborations that supported pedagogical labor. Women at Work also introduces readers to rhetorical methods and approaches possible for the study of gender and work. Contributors name and explore a specific rhetorical concern that animates their study and in so doing, readers learn about such concepts as professional proof, rhetorical failure, epideictic embodiment, rhetorics of care, and cross-racial coalition building.

Now known to the Chinese as the ""ten years of chaos,"" the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76) brought death to thousands of Chinese and persecution to millions. In Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution Xing Lu identifies the rhetorical practices and persuasive effects of the polarizing political language and symbolic practices used by Communist Party leaders to legitimize their use of power and violence to dehumanize people identified as class enemies. Lu provides close readings of the movement's primary texts--political slogans, official propaganda, wall posters, and the lyrics of mass songs and model operas. She also scrutinizes such ritualistic practices as the loyalty dance, denunciation rallies, political study sessions, and criticism and self-criticism meetings. Lu enriches her rhetorical analyses of these texts with her own story and that of her family, as well as with interviews conducted in China and the United States with individuals who experienced the Cultural Revolution during their teenage years. In her new preface, Lu expresses deep concern about recent nationalism, xenophobia, divisiveness, and violence instigated by the rhetoric of hatred and fear in the United States and across the globe. She hopes that by illuminating the way language shapes perception, thought, and behavior, this book will serve as a reminder of past mistakes so that we may avoid repeating them in the future.

Rhetoric was once an essential part of western education. Aristotle wrote an important treatise on it and Demosthenes remains famous to this day for his skills as a rhetorician. But skill with rhetoric today is no longer admired. Rhetoric is often seen as a synonym for shallow, deceptive language-empty words, empty rhetoric--and therefore as something quite negative. But if we view rhetoric in more neutral terms, as the "art of persuasion," it is clear that we are all forced to engage with it at some level, if only because we are constantly exposed to the rhetoric of others. In this Very Short Introduction, Richard Toye explores the purpose of rhetoric. Rather than presenting a defense of it, he considers it as the foundation-stone of civil society, and an essential part of any democratic process. Using wide-ranging examples from ancient Greece, medieval Islamic preaching, the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill, and modern cinema, Toye considers why we should all have an appreciation of the art of rhetoric.
About the Series:
Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

In December 2018, the United States Senate unanimously passed the nation's first antilynching act, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act. For the first time in US history, legislators, representing the American people, classified lynching as a federal hate crime. While lynching histories and memories have received attention among communication scholars and some interdisciplinary studies of traditional civil rights memorials exist, contemporary studies often fail to examine the politicized nature of the spaces. This volume represents the first investigation of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, both of which strategically make clear the various links between America's history of racial terror and contemporary mass incarceration conditions, the mistreatment of juveniles, and capital punishment. Racial Terrorism: A Rhetorical Investigation of Lynching focuses on several key social agents and organizations that played vital roles in the public and legal consciousness raising that finally led to the passage of the act. Marouf A. Hasian Jr. and Nicholas S. Paliewicz argue that the advocacy of attorney Bryan Stevenson, the work of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and the efforts of curators at Montgomery's new Legacy Museum all contributed to the formation of a rhetorical culture that set the stage at last for this hallmark lynching legislation. The authors examine how the EJI uses spaces of remembrance to confront audiences with race-conscious messages and measure to what extent those messages are successful.

Although US history is marred by institutionalized racism and sexism, postracial and postfeminist attitudes drive our polarized politics. Violence against people of color, transgendered and gay people, and women soar upon the backdrop of Donald Trump, Tea Party affiliates, alt-right members like Richard Spencer, and right-wing political commentators like Milo Yiannopoulos who defend their racist and sexist commentary through legalistic claims of freedom of speech. While more institutions recognize the volatility of these white men's speech, few notice or have thoughtfully considered the role of white nationalist, alt-right, and conservative white women's messages that organizationally preserve white supremacy. In Rebirthing a Nation: White Women, Identity Politics, and the Internet, author Wendy K. Z. Anderson details how white nationalist and alt-right women refine racist rhetoric and web design as a means of protection and simultaneous instantiation of white supremacy, which conservative political actors including Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Ivanka Trump have amplified through transnational politics. By validating racial fears and political divisiveness through coded white identity politics, postfeminist and motherhood discourse functions as a colorblind, gilded cage. Rebirthing a Nation reveals how white nationalist women utilize colorblind racism within digital space, exposing how a postfeminist framework becomes fodder for conservative white women's political speech to preserve institutional white supremacy.

Vicki Tolar Burton argues that John Wesley wanted to make ordinary Methodist men and women readers, writers, and public speakers because he understood the powerful role of language for spiritual formation. His understanding came from his own family and education, from his personal spiritual practices and experiences, and from the evidence he saw in the lives of his followers. By examining the intersections of literacy, rhetoric, and spirituality as they occurred in early British Methodism-and by exploring the meaning of these practices for class and gender-the author provides a new understanding of the method of Methodism.

Critical Questions in Persuasion Research presents students with a refreshing way to study persuasion, communication theory, and human behavior. Rather than examining different types of persuasion research and reviewing each one at a time, communication scholars Franklin J. Boster and Christopher J. Carpenter explore eight key controversies, as well as research and theory related to each topic: What constitutes a strong persuasive message, and does it matter? How do we adapt persuasive messages to diverse audiences? Do persuasive messages have side effects? How can we manage the buzz? How can we maintain attitude change? Can a persuasive message be counterproductive? How can we encourage resistance to persuasion? To what extent does action follow from attitudes? By focusing on how various disciplines deal with the big controversies in the persuasion process, students gain an understanding not only of key ideas and theories, but how the ideas and theories fit together in a meaningful whole. By framing persuasion as a series of critical questions, students learn that social science is a dynamic and exciting way in which to study persuasion. Critical Questions in Persuasion Research is an ideal textbook for courses with focus on persuasion, communication, and human behavior.