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The Culture of Epistolarity

The Culture of Epistolarity PDF Author: Gary Schneider
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138757
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
This book is an extensive investigation of letters and letter writing across two centuries, focusing on the sociocultural function and meaning of epistolary writing - letters that were circulated, were intended to circulate, or were perceived to circulate within the culture of epistolarity in early modern England. The study examines how the letter functioned in a variety of social contexts, yet also assesses what the letter meant as idea to early modern letter writers, investigating letters in both manuscript and print contexts. It begins with an overview of the culture of epistolarity, examines the material components of letter exchange, investigates how emotion was persuasively textualized in the letter, considers the transmission of news and intelligence, and examines the publication of letters as propaganda and as collections of moral-didactic, personal, and state letters. Gary Schneider is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas-Pan American.

The Culture of Epistolarity

The Culture of Epistolarity PDF Author: Gary Schneider
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138757
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
This book is an extensive investigation of letters and letter writing across two centuries, focusing on the sociocultural function and meaning of epistolary writing - letters that were circulated, were intended to circulate, or were perceived to circulate within the culture of epistolarity in early modern England. The study examines how the letter functioned in a variety of social contexts, yet also assesses what the letter meant as idea to early modern letter writers, investigating letters in both manuscript and print contexts. It begins with an overview of the culture of epistolarity, examines the material components of letter exchange, investigates how emotion was persuasively textualized in the letter, considers the transmission of news and intelligence, and examines the publication of letters as propaganda and as collections of moral-didactic, personal, and state letters. Gary Schneider is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas-Pan American.

Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China

Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China PDF Author: Antje Richter
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Honorable Mention for the 2016 Kayden Book Award This first book-length study in Chinese or any Western language of personal letters and letter-writing in premodern China focuses on the earliest period (ca. 3rd-6th cent. CE) with a sizeable body of surviving correspondence. Along with the translation and analysis of many representative letters, Antje Richter explores the material culture of letter writing (writing supports and utensils, envelopes and seals, the transportation of finished letters) and letter-writing conventions (vocabulary, textual patterns, topicality, creativity). She considers the status of letters as a literary genre, ideal qualities of letters, and guides to letter-writing, providing a wealth of examples to illustrate each component of the standard personal letter. References to letter-writing in other cultures enliven the narrative throughout. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China makes the social practice and the existing textual specimens of personal Chinese letter-writing fully visible for the first time, both for the various branches of Chinese studies and for epistolary research in other ancient and modern cultures, and encourages a more confident and consistent use of letters as historical and literary sources.

Epistolarity

Epistolarity PDF Author: Janet Gurkin Altman
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814203132
Category : Epistolary fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description


Epistolary Histories

Epistolary Histories PDF Author: Amanda Gilroy
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919737
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
This innovative collection of essays participates in the ongoing debate about the epistolary form, challenging readers to rethink the traditional association between the letter and the private sphere. It also pushes the boundaries of that debate by having the contributors respond to each other within the volume, thus creating a critical community between covers that replicates the dialogic nature of epistolarity itself, with all its dissonances and differences as well as its connections. Focusing mainly on Anglo-American texts from the seventeenth century to the present day, these nine essays and their "postscripts" engage the relationship between epistolary texts and discourses of gender, class, politics, and commodification. Ranging from epistolary histories of Mary Queen of Scots to Turkish travelogues, from the making of the modern middle class and the correspondence of Melville and Hawthorne to new epistolary innovators such as Kathy Acker and Orlan, the contributions are divided into three parts: part 1 addresses the "feminocentric" focus of the letter; part 2, the boundaries between the fictional and the real; and part 3 the ways in which the epistolary genre may help us think more clearly about questions of critical address and discourse that have preoccupied theorists in recent years. In sum, Epistolary Histories is a defining contribution to epistolary studies. Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Brown University Anne L. Bower, Ohio State University, Marion Clare Brant, King's College, London Amanda Gilroy, University of Groningen Richard Hardack, Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges Linda S. Kauffman, University of Maryland, College Park Donna Landry, Wayne State University Gerald MacLean, Wayne State University Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland, College Park W. M. Verhoeven, University of Groningen

Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690

Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690 PDF Author: James Daybell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134771916
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690 is the first collection to examine the gendered nature of women’s letter-writing in England and Ireland from the late-fifteenth century through to the Restoration. The essays collected here represent an important body of new work by a group of international scholars who together look to reorient the study of women’s letters in the contexts of early modern culture. The volume builds upon recent approaches to the letter, both rhetorical and material, that have the power to transform the ways in which we understand, study and situate early modern women’s letter-writing, challenging misconceptions of women’s letters as intrinsically private, domestic and apolitical. The essays in the volume embrace a range of interdisciplinary approaches: historical, literary, palaeographic, linguistic, material and gender-based. Contributors deal with a variety of issues related to early modern women’s correspondence in England and Ireland. These include women’s rhetorical and persuasive skills and the importance of gendered epistolary strategies; gender and the materiality of the letter as a physical form; female agency, education, knowledge and power; epistolary networks and communication technologies. In this volume, the study of women’s letters is not confined to writings by women; contributors here examine not only the collaborative nature of some letter-writing but also explore how men addressed women in their correspondence as well as some rich examples of how women were constructed in and through the letters of men. As a whole, the book stands as a valuable reassessment of the complex gendered nature of early modern women’s correspondence.

Special Delivery

Special Delivery PDF Author: Linda S. Kauffman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226426815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Though letter writing is almost a lost art, twentieth-century writers have mimed the epistolary mode as a means of reevaluating the theme of love. In Special Delivery, Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire. Kauffman first considers male writers whose works, testing the boundaries of genre and gender, imitate love letters: Viktor Shklovsky's Zoo, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, and Jacques Derrida's The Post Card. She then turns to three novels by women who are more preoccupied with politics than passion: Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. By juxtaposing these "women's productions" with the men's "production of Woman," Special Delivery dismantles the polarities between male and female, theory and fiction, high and low culture, male critical theory, and feminist literary criticism. Kauffman demonstrates how all seven texts mercilessly expose the ideology of individualism and romantic love; each presents alternate paradigms of desire, wrested from Oedipus, grounded in history and politics, giving epistolarity a distinctively postmodern stamp.

Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture

Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Williamson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000384764
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Book Description
A new account of Elizabethan diplomacy with an original archival foundation, this book examines the world of letters underlying diplomacy and political administration by exploring a material text never before studied in its own right: the diplomatic letter-book. Author Elizabeth R. Williamson argues that a new focus on the central activity of information gathering allows us to situate diplomacy in its natural context as one of several intertwined areas of crown service, and as one of the several sites of production of political information under Elizabeth I. Close attention to the material features of these letter-books elucidates the environment in which they were produced, copied, and kept, and exposes the shared skills and practices of diplomatic activity, domestic governance, and early modern archiving. This archaeological exploration of epistolary and archival culture establishes a métier of state actor that participates in – even defines – a notably early modern growth in administration and information management. Extending this discussion to our own conditions of access, a new parallel is drawn across two ages of information obsession as Williamson argues that the digital has a natural place in this textual history that we can no longer ignore. This study makes significant contributions to epistolary culture, diplomatic history, and early modern studies more widely, by showing that understanding Elizabethan diplomacy takes us far beyond any single ambassador or agent defined as such: it is a way into an entire administrative landscape and political culture.

Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664

Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664 PDF Author: Diana G. Barnes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317141938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Epistolary Community in Print contends that the printed letter is an inherently sociable genre ideally suited to the theorisation of community in early modern England. In manual, prose or poetic form, printed letter collections make private matters public, and in so doing reveal, first how tenuous is the divide between these two realms in the early modern period and, second, how each collection helps to constitute particular communities of readers. Consequently, as Epistolary Community details, epistolary visions of community were gendered. This book provides a genealogy of epistolary discourse beginning with an introductory discussion of Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser’s Wise and Wittie Letters (1580), and opening into chapters on six printed letter collections generated at times of political change. Among the authors whose letters are examined are Angel Day, Michael Drayton, Jacques du Bosque and Margaret Cavendish. Epistolary Community identifies broad patterns that were taking shape, and constantly morphing, in English printed letters from 1580 to 1664, and then considers how the six examples of printed letters selected for discussion manipulate this generic tradition to articulate ideas of community under specific historical and political circumstances. This study makes a substantial contribution to the rapidly growing field of early modern letters, and demonstrates how the field impacts our understanding of political discourses in circulation between 1580 and 1664, early modern women’s writing, print culture and rhetoric.

Epistolary Practices

Epistolary Practices PDF Author: William Merrill Decker
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807866636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
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.

The Epistolary Renaissance

The Epistolary Renaissance PDF Author: Maria Löschnigg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110584816
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Since the late twentieth century, letters in literature have seen a remarkable renaissance. The prominence of letters in recent fiction is due in part to the rediscovery, by contemporary writers, of letters as an effective tool for rendering aspects of historicity, liminality, marginalization and the expression of subjectivity vis-à-vis an ‘other’; it is also due, however, to the artistically challenging inclusion of the new electronic media of communication into fiction. While studies of epistolary fiction have so far concentrated on the eighteenth century and on thematic concerns, this volume charts the epistolary renaissance in recent literature, entering new territory by also focusing on the aesthetic implications of the epistolary mode. In particular, the essays in this volume illuminate the potential of the epistolary (including digital forms) for rendering contemporary sensitivities. The volume thus offers a comprehensive assessment of letter narratives in contemporary literature. Through its focus on the aesthetic and structural aspects of new epistolary fiction, the inclusion of various narrative forms, and the consideration of both conventional letters and their new digital kindred, The Epistolary Renaissance offers novel insight into a multi-facetted (re)new(ed) genre.