Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain

Description

The letter is a powerfully evocative form that has gained in resonance as the habits of personal letter writing have declined in a digital age. But faith in the letter as evidence of the intimate thoughts of individuals underplays the sophisticated ways letters functioned in the past. In Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain leading scholars approach the letter from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to uncover the habits, forms, and secrets of letter writing. Where material features of the letter have often been ignored by past generations fixated on the text alone, contributors to this volume examine how such elements as handwriting, seals, ink, and the arrangement of words on the manuscript page were significant carriers of meaning alongside epistolary rhetorics. The chapters here also explore the travels of the letter, uncovering the many means through which correspondence reached a reader and the ways in which the delivery of letters preoccupied contemporaries. At the same time, they reveal how other practices, such as the use of cipher and the designs of forgery, threatened to subvert the surveillance and reading of letters. The anxiety of early modern letter writers over the vulnerability of correspondence is testament to the deep dependence of the culture on the letter. Beyond the letter as a material object, Cultures of Correspondence sheds light on textual habits. Individual chapters study the language of letter writers to reveal that what appears to be a personal and unvarnished expression of the writer's thought is in fact a deliberate, skillful exercise in managing the conventions and expectations of the form. If letters were a prominent and ingrained part of the cultural life of the early modern period, they also enjoyed textual and archival afterlives whose stories are rarely told. Too often studied only in the case of figures already celebrated for their historical or literary significance, the letter in Cultures of Correspondence emerges as the most vital and wide-ranging material, textual form of the early modern period. Contributors: Nadine Akkerman, Mark Brayshay, Christopher Burlinson, James Daybell, Jonathan Gibson, Andrew Gordon, Arnold Hunt, Lynne Magnusson, Michelle O'Callaghan, Alan Stewart, Andrew Zurcher.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain

  • 2016-06-28
  • 322 pages
  • Paperback
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

Similar books

• 

  Virginia Woolf and the Great War

  By Karen L. Levenback

  I owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...

• 

  In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship

  By Karen Bojar

  ... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.

• 

  Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts

  By William M. Clements

  HENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...

• 

  Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature

  By William H Bridges

  “Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.

• 

  Shakespeare's Edward III

  By William Shakespeare

  Thompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...

• 

  The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

  By Laura Frost

  In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...

• 

  The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World

  By Laura White

  Similarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...

• 

  Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century

  By Laura Brown

  Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...

• 

  Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century

  By Laura Olcelli

  D'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.

• 

  A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold

  By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender

  ... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...