Frederick Douglass's Curious Audiences: Ethos in the Age of the Consumable Subject (Studies in Major Literary Authors, 35)

This book attempts to answer a fundamental question: How did Douglass manage to persuade anyone about the evils of slavery, and even impress viewers with his personal qualities, when his speeches were commonly considered mere entertainment, in the same category as Barnum's circus acts? In answering this question, Terry Baxter provides a means of understanding the positive responses of Frederick Douglass's white audiences and African American celebrities' roles as both objects of consumption and vehicles for social change.

Douglass was gifted, imposing, and effective. In a time when making an abolitionist speech was often more an exercise in dodging rotten tomatoes than an intellectual debate, Douglass converted many of his vegetable-toting enemies in the crowds who heard him, largely by being what he appeared to be: a man of ethos, despite his lack of education and social status in antebellum America. He was, in essence, a rhetorical success. Here, Baxter argues that a modern theory of ethos needs to begin with an examination of performance like Douglass's antebellum addresses. Baxter traces these changes in the perception of ethos from the classical version which held to the nineteenth century to the decidedly different version practiced in the past few decades of presidential politics. He explores the theory, criticism, and practice of antebellum rhetorical culture, the construction of blackness and the constraint of ethos, and examines Douglass as an exhibit of ethos. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Front cover......Page 1 CONTENTS......Page 8 CHAPTER ONE. Introduction......Page 11 CHAPTER TWO. Reformation and Resentment in Antebellum America......Page 41 CHAPTER THREE. Antebellum Rhetorical Culture in Theory, Criticism, and Practice......Page 69 CHAPTER FOUR. The Construction of Blackness and the Constraint of Ethos......Page 95 CHAPTER FIVE. Douglass as an Exhibitor of Ethos......Page 133 End Notes......Page 163 BIBLIOGRAPHY......Page 183 Index......Page 193 Back cover......Page 197