Epistolary practices : letter writing in America before telecommunications / William Merrill Decker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Decker, William Merrill.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American letters--19th century--History and criticism.

American letters.

Letter writing--United States--History--19th century.

Letter writing.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (294 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c1998.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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:

Intro

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Abbreviations &amp

Note on Quotations

Introduction

1 Burn This Letter

2 I Have Taken This Opportunity of Writing You a Few Lines

3 I Cannot Write This Letter

4 A Letter Always Seemed to Me Like Immortality

5 I Write Now d'Outre Tombe

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [271]-279) and index.

ISBN:

9798890870520

9780807866634

0807866636

OCLC:

45843981