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: How does writing relate to speech? What impact does it have on social organisation and development? How do unwritten languages differ from those that have a written form and tradition? This book is a general account of the place of writing in society...read more

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in correspondence both as a literary genre and as cultural practice, and several studies have appeared, mainly spanning the centuries between Early and Late Modern times. However, it is between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the roots of contemporary usage begin to evolve, thanks to the circulation of new educational materials and more widespread schooling practices. In this volume, chapters representing diverse but complementary methodological approaches discuss linguistic and discursive practices of correspondence in Late Modern Europe, in order to offer material for the comparative, cross-linguistic analyses of patterns occurring in different social contexts. The volume aims to provide a general and solid methodological structure for the study of largely untapped language material from a variety of comparable sources, and is expected to appeal to scholars and students interested in the linguistic history of epistolary writing practices, as well as to all those interested in the more recent history of European languages.