Description: This study traces the post-World War II emergence of rhetoric and composition as discipline within departments of English in institutions of higher education in the United States. It examines the disciplinary formation through the lens of one of the most important vehicles for this field, its scholarly journals. Covering a forty-year span between 1950 to 1990, this history treats some of the complex struggles in which scholars and teachers have engaged to stake ground and construct a professional and disciplinary identity. In short, this book identifies major debates and controversies ignited as the discipline emerged, traces issues and principles that have been foregrounded, and analyzes how those who directed the journals and those who contributed to them helped to shape, and in turn shaped by, the field of rhetoric and composition.

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