Voltaire's correspondence has been described as his 'greatest masterpiece' – but if it is, it is also his least studied. One of the most prodigious correspondences in Western literature, it poses significant interpretative challenges to the critic and reader alike. Considered individually, the letters present a series of complex, subtle, and playful literary performances; taken together, they constitute a formidable, and even forbidding, ensemble. How can modern readers even attempt to understand such an imposing work? This Element addresses this question through the use of digital reading methods and resources that enhance our understanding of this complex literary object and its relationship to Voltaire's more canonical literary output, and indeed to the Enlightenment world at large. Nicholas Cronk and Glenn Roe provide scholars and students with new pathways into this particular corpus, using tools and approaches that can then be applied to correspondences and life-writing texts in all languages and periods.
Through the eighteen essays of this book, the reader becomes the beholder of a challenging survey of “feminism-in-the-making,” from its early stages in the 18th century to the present, in Anglo-Saxon countries and elsewhere, including Eastern Europe and some places under the influence of communism or Islam. The development of exchanges and correspondence enabled feminism to pre-exist the word itself, which leads several contributors to ponder over its meaning as well as over the notion of influence, a pivotal component of their reflection. Through the complex interplay of harmony and disharmony, openly acknowledged or carefully hidden similarities or differences, and the delineation of the converging or conflicting forces which the authors of this volume attempt to disentangle, a fascinating chorus of voices eventually emerges from this volume, a preview of the budding “sisterhood.” It throws light on the major factors in women’s growing consciousness of their plight and of the main stakes in the struggle for the defense of their rights. Scholars of different national origins and methodological approaches here join forces until the book itself amounts to an innovative web of exchanges and correspondences, its medium as well as its avowed message.
Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writingThis comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.Key FeaturesDraws together different emphases on the intellectual, literary and social uses of letter writing Provides students and researchers with a means to situate letters in their wider theoretical and historical contextsMethodologically expansive, intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academicsOffers new insights into the lives and careers of Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others
During the 18th century, letter manuals became the most popular form of conduct literature. They were marketed to and used by a wide spectrum of society, from maidservants and apprentices, through military officers and merchants, to gentlemen, parents and children. This work presents the most influential manuals from both sides of the Atlantic.
This volume illustrates the significance of epistolarity as a literary phenomenon intricately interwoven with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural developments. Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection of essays demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras. Sections of the collection treat letters' implication in transatlanticism, authorship, and reform movements as well as the politics and practices of editing letters. The wide range of authors considered include Mercy Otis Warren, Charles Brockden Brown, members of the Emerson and Peabody families, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stoddard, Catherine Brown, John Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. The volume is particularly relevant for researchers in U.S. literature and history, as well as women's writing and periodical studies. This dynamic collection offers scholars an exemplary template of new approaches for exploring an understudied yet critically important literary genre.
The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.
This is the twenty-first volume in the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke. The series aims to provide authoritative critical editions of all the writings of one of the most important intellectuals in the early-modern Anglophone world. The present volume completes the Correspondence edited by the late E. S. de Beer, published between 1976 and 1989. It contains some 300 documents: newly discovered or augmented, or newly collected, letters by or to Locke, or between his close associates. New finds have emerged from archives worldwide; previously known letters are now improved from new manuscripts or supplemented by enclosures that had become detached from them; 'epistles dedicatory' in books by Locke or addressed to him are collected; third-party letters with direct bearing on Locke are included; as also Locke's agreements with publishers for the printing of his books. The volume covers Locke's manifold interests, from childrearing to medicine to cartography; from the exercise of patronage to the political economy of England's burgeoning empire; from the management of his Somerset tenants to relations with fellow philosopher Damaris Masham; from a trial for heresy to surveillance letters when Locke was suspect; from book collecting to calendrical reform. Locke's critics and vindicators are here, attacking and defending his published works. Considerable material has come to light bearing on Locke's encounters with Carolina and policies when a founding member of the Board of Trade and Plantations. The volume is supported by Mark Goldie's introduction and by an extensive explanatory editorial apparatus.
Letters have long been an outlet for political expression, whether they articulate the personal politics of the daily routine or the political views of individuals who witness or participate in dramatic events. In addition, letters can be unusually revealing records of the relations between men and women. Though letters have frequently been studied as a privileged space for literary, social, and cultural expression, the three-dimensional relationship of politics, gender, and letters has not been the focus of an entire volume. The nineteen essays in this collection examine how the gendered nature of political literacy is revealed over a 250-year period through letter writing, whether the writer is famous or unknown, the wife of a prominent politician or activist, a political prisoner or political militant. Ranging wide in terms of subject matter and geography, the contributors examine correspondence that ponders familial concerns, as well as letters providing political commentary on the effects of war or revolution on everyday life. Among the impressive group of international scholars are Jim Allen, Clare Brant, Edith Gelles, Jane Rendall, and Siân Reynolds.