Edinburgh University Press The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing (Edinburgh Companions to Literature) (Edinburgh Companions to ... Companions to Literature and the Humanities)

This 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. Review There really is something for everyone in this hugely impressive collection of essays: discussions of the importance of letters to US migrant histories; materialist histories of postal systems and direct mail marketing (of ideas, as well as of goods); and the significance of letters to literary culture. From treatments of the (relatively) arcane to canonical texts, the range is simply staggering. --Sinéad Moynihan, THES From the Back Cover *APPROVED* Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writing This 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. Methodologically expansive, with intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academics, this book offers 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. Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of African American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Judie Newman, OBE, is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Matthew Pethers is an Associate Professor in American Intellectual and Cultural History at the University of Nottingham. About the Author Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of African American Studies University of Nottingham and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of American Studies (Cambridge University Press). Judie Newman, OBE, is a former Chair of the British Association for American Studies, a Founding Fellow of the English Association, the recipient of the Arthur Miller Prize in American Studies, and Professor of American Studies, University of Nottingham. Matthew Pethers is an Associate Professor in American Intellectual and Cultural History at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on the literary history, print culture, performative arts and scientific thought of eighteenth and nineteenth-century America.