Crafting the Creative Life: The Rhetorical Dimensions of Selected Australian Quilters' Magazines 1988 - 2005

Abstract

This thesis answers the question of how magazines produced for Australian quilters respond rhetorically to their readers as members of communities bound by a specialised form of creative practice. It does so primarily by applying methods of rhetorical criticism to three commercially produced, newsstand magazines: 'Down Under Quilts', 'Australian Patchwork & Quilting' and 'Australian Quilters Companion'. The thesis augments a developing field of scholarship on Australian special-interest magazines and acknowledges, through its methodology, the essentially rhetorical (in its simplest sense, persuasive) function of magazines that respond to and shape communities of readers. As rhetorical artefacts, the three magazines are derivative of other types of publication yet are generically distinctive. In both respects, this is seen partly through the magazines' juxtaposition of instruction and other text into which are embedded narratives of quilts and quilters. These narratives, over time, display a degree of coherence and believability in their shaping of the archetypal accomplished quilter with which readers are encouraged to identify or to which they are encouraged to aspire. Other distinctive and dominant aspects of the magazines, both verbal and visual, contribute to the clear yet complex picture of the quilter that emerges from the magazines, and these, along with narrative elements, are considered in the thesis through three strands of rhetorical criticism (generic, traditional and narrative).