Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications - Softcover

Decker, William Merrill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807847437 ISBN 13: 9780807847435

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

"One measure of a book's worth is the number of interesting questions it provokes. Add to that carefully researched historical information, sensitive and thought-provoking discussions of literary figures, new insights into the ubiquitous letter form, all presented in elegant prose, and Epistolary Practices must be judged a stunning success."-- Prose Studies

From the Inside Flap:

Using letters written by John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, and others, Šthis book examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the postmodern period. Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of space, settlement, separation, and reunion.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0807847437
• ISBN 13: 9780807847435
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304