Epistolary Responses

Letters - a most traditional and old-fashioned form of discourse - continue to offer special opportunities for writers and readers in the postmodern era. Bower explores the way letters shape the act of writing and writing as act.

Informed by Jurgen Habermas's public sphere theory, this book studies the popular eighteenth-century genre of the epistolary narrative through readings of four works: Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), Richardson's Clarissa (1749-50), Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782).The author situates epistolary narratives in the contexts of eighteenth-century print culture: the rise of new models of readership and the newly influential role of the author; the model of contract derived from liberal political theory; and the techniques and aesthetics of mechanical reproduction. Epistolary authors used the genre to formulate a range of responses to a cultural anxiety about private energies and appetites, particularly those of women, as well as to legitimate their own authorial practices. Just as the social contract increasingly came to be seen as the organising instrument of public, civic relations in this period, the author argues that the epistolary novel serves to socialise and regulate the private subject as a citizen of the Republic of Letters.

A comprehensive look at the use of imaginary letters in Greek literature, first published in 2001.

"This book brings together feminist histories in education with an innovative approach to epistolary narrative analytics. In deploying the notion of the epistolary bildung the author rigorously and eloquently shows how the correspondence of Barbara Bodichon can shed fresh light in a range of personal problems and public issues in women’s lives, which remain relevant today" - Maria Tamboukou, Professor of Feminist Studies, University of East London, UK This book assesses Barbara Bodichon’s significance in the history of the women’s movement in Britain by elaborating a conceptualisation of letters as sources of feminist development. Bodichon was the leader of the first women’s suffrage committee in England, which collected 1,500 signatures in favour of the female vote – a petition presented in the House of Commons by sympathising MPs to support the amendment of the 1867 Reform Bill. This book explores the significance of letter-exchange in Barbara Bodichon’s feminist becoming as she managed to mobilize partisans and secure signatures by means of chains of friendship letters spreading across the country. For letters functioned as platforms where, concomitantly to her making sense of her experiential input, Bodichon adopted, redefined and challenged circulating discourses – transforming them in the process and hence contributing to the production of feminist knowledge, intersubjectively and collaboratively in dialogue with her addressees. At the crossroads of history of feminism, gender history and history of women’s education, this book explores the significance of letter-exchange in Bodichon’s development into one of the galvanizing figures of the women’s rights movement in Victorian England.

This innovative collection of essays participates in the ongoing debate about the epistolary form, challenging readers to rethink the traditional association between the letter and the private sphere. It also pushes the boundaries of that debate by having the contributors respond to each other within the volume, thus creating a critical community between covers that replicates the dialogic nature of epistolarity itself, with all its dissonances and differences as well as its connections. Focusing mainly on Anglo-American texts from the seventeenth century to the present day, these nine essays and their "postscripts" engage the relationship between epistolary texts and discourses of gender, class, politics, and commodification. Ranging from epistolary histories of Mary Queen of Scots to Turkish travelogues, from the making of the modern middle class and the correspondence of Melville and Hawthorne to new epistolary innovators such as Kathy Acker and Orlan, the contributions are divided into three parts: part 1 addresses the "feminocentric" focus of the letter; part 2, the boundaries between the fictional and the real; and part 3 the ways in which the epistolary genre may help us think more clearly about questions of critical address and discourse that have preoccupied theorists in recent years. In sum, Epistolary Histories is a defining contribution to epistolary studies. Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Brown University Anne L. Bower, Ohio State University, Marion Clare Brant, King's College, London Amanda Gilroy, University of Groningen Richard Hardack, Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges Linda S. Kauffman, University of Maryland, College Park Donna Landry, Wayne State University Gerald MacLean, Wayne State University Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland, College Park W. M. Verhoeven, University of Groningen

This revisionary study of the origins of courtly poetry reveals the culture of spectatorship and voyeurism that shaped early Tudor English literary life. Through research into the reception of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, it demonstrates how Pandarus became the model of the early modern courtier. His blend of counsel, secrecy and eroticism informed the behaviour of poets, lovers, diplomats and even Henry VIII himself. In close readings of the poetry of Hawes and Skelton, the drama of the court, the letters of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, the writings of Thomas Wyatt, and manuscript anthologies and early printed books, Seth Lerer illuminates a 'Pandaric' world of displayed bodies, surreptitious letters and transgressive performances. In the process, he redraws the boundaries between the medieval and the Renaissance and illustrates the centrality of the verse epistle to the construction of subjectivity.

In the wake of American independence, it was clear that the new United States required novel political forms. Less obvious but no less revolutionary was the idea that the American people needed a new understanding of the self. Sensibility was a cultural movement that celebrated the human capacity for sympathy and sensitivity to the world. For individuals, it offered a means of self-transformation. For a nation lacking a monarch, state religion, or standing army, sensibility provided a means of cohesion. National independence and social interdependence facilitated one another. What Sarah Knott calls "the sentimental project" helped a new kind of citizen create a new kind of government. Knott paints sensibility as a political project whose fortunes rose and fell with the broader tides of the Revolutionary Atlantic world. Moving beyond traditional accounts of social unrest, republican and liberal ideology, and the rise of the autonomous individual, she offers an original interpretation of the American Revolution as a transformation of self and society.

This descriptive analysis of contemporary Portuguese culture from a historical perspective covers topics ranging from art, cuisine, and music to government, politics, and religion. Portugal is evolving quickly as an integrated part of modern Europe. What was until the mid-1970s an old-world society, where 80 percent of the economy was controlled by an oligarchy of eight elite families, is now increasingly a model of an advanced European state. Portugal now ranks highly among the countries of the world in level of globalization and quality of life; it even boasts one of the best-developed renewable energy infrastructures of any developed country. Despite such widespread modernization, however, "old country" Portuguese traditions persist in the political realms, as well as the traditional lifestyles that endure in the countryside. Culture and Customs of Portugal devotes careful attention to such topics as Portuguese holidays, media, marriage, gender roles, architecture, and education, providing readers with a full account of Portugal's rich heritage and modern culture. The drastic changes in the nation following the 1974 military coup that overthrew a 48-year dictatorship receive special attention.

Among the thirteenth-century saints exalted are female martyrs and hermits of early Christianity. In The Lady as Saint, Brigitte Cazelles offers the first English translation of these lives and provides extensive commentary on the portrayal of female spirituality.

In this unique and long-awaited volume, Michael Anesko documents the literary cross-fertilization between Henry James and William Dean Howells, collecting 151 letters, nearly all the extant correspondence between the two men, as well as the most significant critical commentary James wrote on Howells and Howells wrote on James. Containing dozens of previously unpublished letters by James, and featuring a detailed biographical chronology as well as extensive interpretive commentaries that meticulously chart the development of this remarkable literary friendship, Letters, Fictions, Lives, edited to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, will prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of James and Howells, and will hold great interest for dedicated readers of their fiction and for those studying epistolary issues and literary influence between contemporaries.