Traces of a Stream deals a special scholarly viewpoint that merges pursuits in rhetorical and literacy reports, usa social and political idea, and African American ladies writers. targeting elite nineteenth-century African American girls who shaped a brand new category of girls good situated to take advantage of language with final result, Royster makes use of interdisciplinary views (literature, background, feminist reviews, African American stories, psychology, artwork, sociology, economics) to offer a well-textured rhetorical research of the literate practices of those ladies. With a shift in academic chance after the Civil conflict, African American ladies won entry to raised schooling and bought formal education in rhetoric and writing. by means of the tip of the nineteenth-century, major numbers of African American girls operated actively in lots of public arenas.

In her research, Royster recognizes the endurance of disempowering forces within the lives of African American ladies and their equivalent perseverance opposed to those forces. Amid those stipulations, Royster perspectives the purchase of literacy as a dynamic second for African American ladies, not just when it comes to their use of written language to meet their normal wishes for employer and authority, but additionally to satisfy socio-political reasons as well.

Traces of a Stream is a exhibit for nineteenth-century African American ladies, and especially elite ladies, as a gaggle of writers who're at the moment underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated either an analytical conception and an ideological standpoint which are important in gaining a extra generative realizing of literate practices as a complete and the practices of African American girls specifically. Royster tells a story of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative routes of seeing, analyzing, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to set up a stronger position for the contributions and achievements of African American girls writers.