Product Description: The author of the much-admired Tolstoy and the Purple Chair goes on a quest through the history of letters and her own personal correspondence to discover and celebrate what is special about the handwritten letter.Hailed as witty, moving, enlightening, and inspiring, Signed, Sealed, Delivered begins with Nina Sankovitch’s discovery of a trove of hundred year-old letters...read more

Product Description: This study represents a significant reinterpretation of literary networks during what is often called the transition from manuscript to print during the early modern period. It is based on a survey of 28,000 letters and over 850 mainly English correspondents, ranging from consumers to authors, significant patrons to state regulators, printers to publishers, from 1615 to 1725...read more

Product 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...read more

Product Description: This book examines Elizabeth's correspondence with several significant rulers, analyzing how her letters were constructed, drafted and presented, the rhetorical strategies used, and the role these letters played in facilitating diplomatic relations.

Product Description: In looking closely at Horace Walpole's Correspondence, George E. Haggerty shows how these letters, when taken in aggregate, offer an astonishingly vivid account of the vagaries of eighteenth-century masculinity. Walpole talks about himself obsessively: his wants, his needs, his desires; his physical and mental pain; his artistic appreciation and his critical responses...read more

Susan Whyman draws on a hidden world of previously unknown letter writers to explore bold new ideas about the history of writing, reading and the novel. Capturing actual dialogues of people discussing subjects as diverse as marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants, The Pen and the People will be enjoyed by everyone interested in history, literature, and the intimate experiences of ordinary people. Based on over thirty-five previously unknown letter collections, it tells the stories of workers and the middling sort -- a Yorkshire bridle maker, a female domestic servant, a Derbyshire wheelwright, an untrained woman writing poetry and short stories, as well as merchants and their families. Their ordinary backgrounds and extraordinary writings challenge accepted views that popular literacy was rare in England before 1800. This democratization of letter writing could never have occurred without the development of the Royal Mail. Drawing on new information gleaned from personal letters, Whyman reveals how the Post Office had altered the rhythms of daily life long before the nineteenth century. As the pen, the post, and the people became increasingly connected, so too were eighteenth-century society and culture slowly and subtly transformed.

Product Description: In this original study, Milne moves between close readings of letters, postcards and emails, and investigations of the material, technological infrastructures of these forms, to answer the question: How does presence function as an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy within networked communication practices? As her work reveals, the relation between old and new communication systems is more complex than allowed in much contemporary media theory...read more

Product Description: The Atlantic represented a world of opportunity in the eighteenth century, but it represented division also, separating families across its coasts. Whether due to economic shifts, changing political landscapes, imperial ambitions, or even simply personal tragedy, many families found themselves fractured and disoriented by the growth and later fissure of a larger Atlantic world...read more

Product Description: The studies presented in this volume concentrate on aspects of Late Modern English correspondence in the usage of individuals belonging to different social classes, writing for different purposes, and finding themselves in different social contexts, both in Britain and in its colonies...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays shows how letters nimbly traverse the boundaries between the public and the private and examines the many roles of correspondence, from the domestic to the global. Contributors discuss a variety of engrossing subjects: documents of early exploration and diplomacy, including Columbus's texts and Amerigo Vespucci's reports of his experiences in America; the surprisingly large role that letters played in the success of the Jesuit order in the seventeenth century; English letter-writing manuals that provide model letters to be imitated while offering a vivid view into a cross section of lived experience; epistolary travel writings; and letter-writing instruction in nineteenth-century America, among other topics...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare and Social Dialogue develops a systematic analysis of the rhetoric of social exchange in early modern England. Magnusson brings together writings, particularly letters, from the Elizabethan period that are normally read as historical documents and compares them with Shakespeare's play texts and sonnets...read more

Product Description: This book represents the most comprehensive study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period so far undertaken, and acts as an important corrective to traditional ways of reading and discussing letters as private, elite, male, and non-political...read more

Product Description: Among the most frequently reprinted books of the long eighteenth century, English, Scottish and American letter manuals spread norms of polite conduct and communication which helped to connect and unify different regions of the British Atlantic world, even as they fostered and helped to create very different local and regional cultures and values...read more

Product 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...read more

Product Description: The author explores and describes the nature of what he terms "epistolary spaces", phenomena that came into being as a result of the foundation during the 1650s of a Post Office available to the general public. He focuses on the history of letter-writing by English men and women, and in so doing he shows how the imaginations of letter writers were affected by the increasingly cheaper, faster and more efficient postal services that were developed throughout the time period covered...read more

Product Description: This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Paston family are famous for the large collection of letters and papers that bear their name. This, the second volume in Colin Richmond's individual and compelling study of the Pastons, describes the bitter disputes over Sir John Fastolf's will, which hold a wider significance for the law, English society, and the complex politics of the fifteenth century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The Pastons of Paston, Norfolk, are famous for the collection of letters and papers which bear their name. In particular 'the Paston Letters' have been well known since the time of Horace Walpole, although until now they have never been used systematically by historians of fifteenth-century England: they are both immensely attractive to read and fiendishly difficult to use as source material from which to write history. This volume describes, in lively and original style, the beginnings of the family's gentility and sets out some of the major themes of their history between 1400 and 1500. Many of the themes are common to all gentry families of the later Middle Ages, a period critical in the formation of the English polity. It might also be said that the Pastons epitomize a class which since the later Middle Ages has dominated the English state, English society and English culture. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This landmark book of essays examines the development of women's letter writing from the late fifteenth to the early eighteen century. It is the first book to deal comprehensively with women's letter writing during the Late Medieval and Early Modern period and shows that this was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has generally been assumed...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)