The author of the much-admired Tolstoy and the Purple Chair goes on a quest through the history of letters and her own personal correspondence to discover and celebrate what is special about the handwritten letter.

Product Description: This study represents a significant reinterpretation of literary networks during what is often called the transition from manuscript to print during the early modern period. It is based on a survey of 28,000 letters and over 850 mainly English correspondents, ranging from consumers to authors, significant patrons to state regulators, printers to publishers, from 1615 to 1725...read more

Product Description: In this original study, Milne moves between close readings of letters, postcards and emails, and investigations of the material, technological infrastructures of these forms, to answer the question: How does presence function as an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy within networked communication practices? As her work reveals, the relation between old and new communication systems is more complex than allowed in much contemporary media theory...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays shows how letters nimbly traverse the boundaries between the public and the private and examines the many roles of correspondence, from the domestic to the global. Contributors discuss a variety of engrossing subjects: documents of early exploration and diplomacy, including Columbus's texts and Amerigo Vespucci's reports of his experiences in America; the surprisingly large role that letters played in the success of the Jesuit order in the seventeenth century; English letter-writing manuals that provide model letters to be imitated while offering a vivid view into a cross section of lived experience; epistolary travel writings; and letter-writing instruction in nineteenth-century America, among other topics...read more

Product Description: Among the most frequently reprinted books of the long eighteenth century, English, Scottish and American letter manuals spread norms of polite conduct and communication which helped to connect and unify different regions of the British Atlantic world, even as they fostered and helped to create very different local and regional cultures and values...read more

Product Description: This book is an extensive investigation of letters and letter writing across two centuries, focusing on the sociocultural function and meaning of epistolary writing - letters that were circulated, were intended to circulate, or were perceived to circulate within "the culture of epistolarity" in early modern England...read more

Product Description: The author explores and describes the nature of what he terms "epistolary spaces", phenomena that came into being as a result of the foundation during the 1650s of a Post Office available to the general public. He focuses on the history of letter-writing by English men and women, and in so doing he shows how the imaginations of letter writers were affected by the increasingly cheaper, faster and more efficient postal services that were developed throughout the time period covered...read more

Product Description: This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts...read more

The Pastons of Paston, Norfolk, are famous for the collection of letters and papers which bear their name. In particular 'the Paston Letters' have been well known since the time of Horace Walpole, although until now they have never been used systematically by historians of fifteenth-century England: they are both immensely attractive to read and fiendishly difficult to use as source material from which to write history. This volume describes, in lively and original style, the beginnings of the family's gentility and sets out some of the major themes of their history between 1400 and 1500. Many of the themes are common to all gentry families of the later Middle Ages, a period critical in the formation of the English polity. It might also be said that the Pastons epitomize a class which since the later Middle Ages has dominated the English state, English society and English culture.