Foiling Kamesian Belletristic Theory in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Scotland
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Advances in the History of Rhetoric on March 1st, 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/15362426.2019.1569416. ; Two disciplinary stories that take place in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland omit an important plotline. One story is that university teaching of rhetoric transformed into belletristic criticism; another is that ideology and culture transformed to reorient rhetorical theorizing toward everyday practices by non-elites. Untold is a story of how familiar protagonists, such as Hugh Blair, clashed with antagonists, such as John Witherspoon, in the Church of Scotland. Telling that story from the antagonists' perspective shows that they reflected on how rhetoric ought to be practiced to manage disagreement in a democratic institution, and used what amounted to Kamesian belletrism as a foil.