"Gentry Rhetoric: Literacies, Letters, and Writing in an Elizabethan Community," a book by Dr. Daniel Ellis, associate professor of English, will be available from the University of Nebraska Press in December.

Gentry Rhetoric" examines the full range of influences on the Elizabethan and Jacobean genteel classes’ practice of English rhetoric in daily life. Ellis surveys how the gentry of late 16th and early 17th century Norfolk wrote to and negotiated with each other by employing Renaissance humanist rhetoric, both to solidify their identity and authority in resisting absolutism and authoritarianism, and to transform the political and social state.