Epistolary Practices

作者:Decker, William Merrill

页数:336

出版时间:1998-11

价格:$ 45.14

isbn号码:9780807847435

承接 住宅 自建房 室内改造 装修设计 免费咨询 QQ：624617358 一级注册建筑师 亲自为您回答、经验丰富，价格亲民。无论项目大小，都全力服务。期待合作，欢迎咨询！QQ：624617358

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.