ABSTRACT
By the 1840s textbooks standardizing an expressive kind of writing instruction were emerging out of the more communicative advanced rhetorics. By pruning out oral composing, composition textbooks reflected the bifurcation of basic English studies into separate curricula for writing and speaking. All the while the broad belles lettres spanning history and poetry, chiefly canonized by non-specialist clergy and lawyers, transitioned to an academic-professional literary criticism sustained by anthologies and literary histories which reformulated the traditional rhetorical reader.
