Enemyship - 9780870139802

In the latter years of the American Revolutionary War and in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, many of the wealthy and powerful leaders of the Revolution began to worry that the rhetoric of revolution would pose problems for maintaining control over the economy and political institutions. In response to this problem, Engels (communication arts and sciences, Penn State U.) argues, they deployed a rhetoric of "enemyship" as a strategy for taming revolutionary democracy. This rhetoric involved naming enemies and erasing their individualities in favor of caricaturized negativities, defining the relationship between self and enemies as one that excludes the possibility of communication and compromise, and using tropes of imminence and inevitability to escalate the crisis between self and the enemy. He begins by examining the rhetoric of "enemyship" as deployed against the British as well as dissenters such as Philadelphia's Quakers in Thomas Paine's Common Sense and then turns in later chapters to explorations of how "enemyship" was then aimed at post-war farmers' rebellions and used as a tool to demand loyalty to the Constitution and distract citizens from their grievances. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)