Pictorial Representations of British America Resisting Rape: Rhetorical Re-Circulation of a Print Series Portraying the Boston Port Bill of 1774

Michael Warner and others have characterized "circulation" as enabling a composition to address an audience of strangers who, by devoting attention to it, become its public. To examine Warner's notion critically, this essay traces the "re-circulation" of one eighteenth-century print to argue that, despite the seemingly stable surface imagery, the composition's migration across place, time, and medium affected the eventfulness and timeliness of its contingent meanings and the shifting terrain of its rhetorical usages. Re-circulation can be rhetorical in that it is both a response to an earlier version and a reshaping of it for other, sometimes overlapping audiences.