Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before TelecommunicationsUniv of North Carolina Press, 2000 M11 9 - 304 pages Letters have long been read as primary sources for biography and history, but their performative, fictive, and textual dimensions have only recently attracted serious notice. In this book, William Merrill Decker examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the postmodern period. After offering an overview of the genre, Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of space, settlement, separation, and reunion. He discusses letters written by such well-known and well-educated persons as John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, and Alice James, but also letters by persons who, except in their correspondence, were not writers at all: indentured servants, New England factory workers, slaves, soldiers, and Western pioneers. Individual chapters explore the letter writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Adams--three of America's most ambitious, accomplished, and theoretically astute letter writers. Finally, Decker considers the ongoing transformation of letter writing in the electronic age. |
Contents
Autograph Missive and Published Text | |
I Have Taken This Opportunity of Writing You a | |
Ralph Waldo Emerson | |
Emily | |
Henry Adams | |
Letter Writing in the Era of Telecommunications | |
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Abigail Abigail Adams absence Adams writes Adams’s addressed affirms American articulate artifact become bereavement Boston brother Carlyle Charles Charles Francis Adams Clover communication condolence conversation correspondence culture dear death Dickinson’s letters discourse dispatch distance edition Elizabeth Cameron email Emerson’s letters Emily Dickinson England epistolary exchange epistolary fiction epistolary practice existence experience expression familiar letter father feel Frethorne friends friendship Fuller Gaskell heart Henry Adams holograph human human bond identifies immortality increasingly inscribed intimacy John John Adams language letter exchange letter sheet letter volumes letter writing literary living LRWE Margaret Fuller Mary Moody Emerson material metonymic narrative never occasion one’s passage poems political presence published Ralph Waldo Emerson readers readership received reference reflects relations relationship represent reunion rhetoric selfconscious separation social space speak theme Thomas Carlyle thought utterance Washington wife Winthrop word written wrote