The Death of the Letter? Epistolary Intent, Letterness and the Many Ends of Letter-Writing (original) (raw)
Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture
Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation. Edited by Margaret King, 2013
Early modern letter writing spanned literary and nonliterary, public and private, elite and popular culture as no other scriptural practice did. As documents, letters record both historical and linguistic data. In form and function, they bridge to modern journalistic media, and to literary genres like essays, diaries, and novels. The letter is also peculiarly related to oral discourse. The ancients theorized letters in works on rhetoric. Medieval letter writers drew upon theories of oratory, establishing in the late 11th century a standardized, five-part letter structure that endured well into early modernity. And humanists cast letters as conversations between absent friends. An explosive growth in letter writing and a rethinking of epistolary practices took place in Europe between the 14th and the 16th centuries, due to four contributing factors: (1) Banking, industry, and trade networks intensified exchanges of goods and information among increasingly global markets. Merchants' practical needs spurred a significant rise in literacy (and letter writing), for the first time realized in vernaculars, rather than Latin.
“Ego Documents: Letters (Modern)”
Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method Engaging with Sources, 2021
Introduction Personal letters provide a wealth of insight in narrating the social and emotional world of ordinary people, for they contain the unspoken thoughts and feelings that remain hidden and locked away from the public to hear and see. As private and intimate forms of communication, notes are most often exchanged among family members, friends, and lovers, and used in maintaining relations, marriage, and courtships, among other consensual relationships. People are frequently moved to write when they find themselves across a divide or distance from individuals with whom they wish to exchange information and have no other means to do so because of technological, geographic, and economic difficulties. In producing the correspondence, letter writers often use the opportunity to reflect on their lived experiences and account for their hopes and dreams as well as their failures. The utility of correspondence makes it a versatile form of communication and, in the process, open to multiple interpretations and applications. While letters are most readily utilized to nurture and sustain relationships, they are employed, too, to destroy or end those same unions, especially when those relations have become strained over the course of weeks, months, or years without contact or because of waning interest or some other circumstance. At times, authors stop writing altogether, providing little explanation for failing to respond, effectively ending the epistolary relationship. More than intimate, emotional, and individual expressions of love and desire, personal letters provide a window onto the social, economic, cultural, and political developments of the day. Unlike professional correspondence, which focuses primarily on official or businessrelated information connected with public and private entities, personal correspondence lends accounts of the latest news on individual and collective lives as well as broader currents. References to political debates, financial affairs, cultural events, or technological advances have the power to reveal how macro-level trends intersect with people's lives on a micro scale. Equally important to what is said is how is it said, for language is a powerful mode of communicating the social and cultural milieu of a particular moment and place in time. To understand the significance of personal letters, researchers must analyse them within the historical context in which they are produced. Failing to do so renders the letters anecdotal, irrelevant, and cut off from the ebbs and flows of the particular corner of the globe. Personal letters share many distinctive features. The vast majority contain a salutation, which can be lengthy and formal at times, yet it is, nevertheless, an intimate and emotional expression, setting the context for the reader. Notes also contain closing refrains, with the author sending greetings, love, or remembrances to the reader and any related family or friends. Final words, too, bring closure to the communication. Depending on the individual's economic and social circumstances, the correspondence is usually written on paper, usually on full or sometimes half-sheets to save resources, though, occasionally, authors-in their haste to communicate-scribble off notes on scraps of paper and send those as their communication. Letters written prior to the invention of the typewriter in the 1870s were normally handwritten. Yet, even after the appearance of movable type, authors preferred to handwrite their communication. The pen nib, ink, and paper, however, were not always available, forcing them to find alternative means to communicate. Even those without literacy or limited education had the ability to craft missives. They did so by hiring a scribe or finding an intermediary who was willing to write the letters for them. Scribes, particularly family members, however, could not always be trusted to write verbatim or interpret the accurate meaning of a message, leaving the author vulnerable to the whims of unruly writer. Like all sources, letters have biases, for they are inconsistent, manipulative, and formulaic. Sometimes, too, they go missing, are undated, illegible, incomplete, mundane, or are penned sporadically. Despite their shortcomings, as is common to all source materials, they provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a glimpse into the intimate, emotional, and social lives of ordinary men and women. In addition to confronting the challenges of interpreting, producing, and procuring the supplies to produce letters, letter writers need to know or learn how to navigate the mail system. To do so, authors must figure out addresses and postage as well as the frequency of mail pickup and delivery, especially for national and international letters, which took much longer than regional routes. While the upper classes likely had employees or servants take care of the details of such labor, they nevertheless had some working knowledge of the nature of the postal service. Understanding the mail system likely insured some level of privacy in corresponding but did not always guarantee against prying eyes or hands from intercepting letters meant for another. The personal letters of people from diverse social classes, genders, and racial and ethnic backgrounds in the Americas and Europe have been used by scholars, novelists, and artists to reconstruct the popular and less well-known or hidden histories of the modern period, from the 1800s to the present. Scholars such as historians and literary critics have turned to letters seeking to understand the personal and social circumstances of ordinary as well as extraordinary individuals. Immigration historians have employed them to recreate the lives of migrants-men and women-who risked their lives and left everything they knew behind in immigrating across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as well as U.S.-Mexico borderlands to establish new lives and find means of survival (Gerber 2006; Cancian 2010, 2013, Chávez-García 2008; Thomas 1996), while literature specialists have relied on them to understand the personal and professional challenges of famed activists, poets, playwrights, and columnists such as Langston Hughes (Roessel 2000; Hughes et al. 2001; Hughes 2016, 2013). Writers (Mailer 1979) have also studied them to create fictional accounts grounded in history, while biographers (Griffith 1982) have trusted them to recreate the life of wellknown or even lesser known people who made an impact on society. As writers, novelists, and scholars have learned, personal letters provide unparalleled tools for recreating narratives with all the immediacy and vibrancy as it was being lived, allowing for richly textured, vivid and detailed, intimate accounts of the past. Encounters Historians encounter letters in almost any field of research in modern history in the Americas and Europe. Most commonly, correspondence is found among settled and literate communities, among upper-and middle-class families, though poor, working class, and unlettered people sent, received, and kept them as well. Anthropologist Manuel Gamio's interviews (2002) with Mexican immigrants in the U.S. Southwest in 1926 and 1927 indicate that expatriates regularly wrote home to family members and friends with news about their travel in el norte (literally, the north). That form of exchange, as well as word of mouth, was central to motivating scores of Mexicans in the early twentieth century to try their luck in the United States. Letter writing was also not a purview solely of men. Women, as those in Gamio's study, were just as likely as men to produce and exchange cartas (letters).
When the Letter Speaks Up: Living and Lifeless Letters [preview]
Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne, Scott J. DiGiulio and Inger N.I. Kuin (eds.), Documentality. New Approaches to Written Documents in Imperial Life and Literature, 2022
This chapter uncovers the oral elements of the ancient epistolary experience by considering the role of late antique letter-carriers, who would animate written letters by reading them aloud and conveying personal messages from sender to recipient. This emphasis on epistolary performances and the personification of the letter-writer by the messenger underscores that written text was not necessarily perceived as the most authoritative medium in ancient record-keeping. Simultaneously, this evidence demonstrates the utility of Ferraris’s notion that social acts can be inscribed as immaterial documents in memory, to be passed on subsequently via the messenger’s oral utterances. Late Antiquity’s “living letters” reflect our still-evolving understanding of the Graeco- Roman epistolary habit.
Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014
Letters are creation of human interaction, and thus dialogical. So, a letter is where relationships live, between the writer and reader. The very process of writing a letter is a way in which they memorialize and contextualise their relationship. The study of these relationships shape academic interests across multiple disciplines culturally, literarily, historically, anthropologically or philosophically, along with related concerns, such as ethical issues and methodological difficulties. In titling the volume, Approaching Letters and Letter Writing, we have drawn attention to the way in which we scrutinize letters and letter writing from different perspectives. Although there are a variety of approaches to the study of letters and letter writing, this volume will focus on the following scopes: the form of the material and the immateriality, the private space and public implication, as well as the individual narratives and the cultural interpretation.