| Abstract | My dissertation explores the imperialist rhetorics of nineteenth-century journalist Frances Power Cobbe. The project intersects feminist rhetorical theories with periodical studies and Irish studies in order to more fully examine how Cobbe, a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, negotiates her classed and gendered positions within the English periodical press. Using seven essays about Ireland that Cobbe wrote for various periodicals as case studies, I show that Cobbe was able to negotiate each periodical as a rhetorical space: her ability to shape what was essentially the same argument--that England should remain in control of Ireland--for the different audiences of each publication proves her ability to function successfully as a rhetor within Victorian culture, a culture that circumscribed the voices of women and colonial others." Cobbe used the genre conventions of the periodical essay to address a mostly English audience from the considerably disadvantaged position of an Irish woman, adopting the "default masculinity" of the editorial voice of the middle-class periodical in order to construct an objective, and thus, persuasive, persona. Cobbe was a writer who performed a number of identities, a writer through which we can follow several lines of inquiry: we can look to her writing as evidence of women's agency within a culture that sought to repress women's expression; or we can look to her writing as evidence of the perspective of a loyalist Anglo-Irish woman writing about the ongoing conflicts between Ireland and England. My project does both. Cobbe's most persuasive strategy hinges on her ability to fashion an identity that uses her experiential knowledge as an Anglo-Irish woman in order to persuade. My central thesis is that Cobbe used the periodical press to rearticulate the position of cultural "other" as a location of rhetorical power by constructing an identity that would speak from an authoritative position in between or even outside of paradigmatic and often opposite positions. By shifting the power to a space outside the location usually invested with power in Victorian culture--read: white, male, middle-class or above, straight Englishman--Cobbe could speak persuasively in multiple and shifting contexts"--Abstract. |
