A01=William Merrill Decker
Abigail and John Adams
Alice James
American literary history
American Studies
Author_William Merrill Decker
Benjamin Franklin
Category=DSB
colonial period
Emily Dickinson
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Henry Adams
Henry David Thoreau
Henry James
indentured servants
John Winthrop
letter writing in the electronic age
Margaret Fuller
Nathaniel Hawthorne
New England factory workers
personal letter
popular and literary culture
postmodern period
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Samuel Clemens
slaves
soldiers
Thomas Jefferson
Western pioneers
Product details
- ISBN 9780807847435
- Weight: 460g
- Dimensions: 145 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 1998
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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. |Using letters written by John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, and others, this book examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the postmodern period. Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of space, settlement, separation, and reunion.
Author of The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams, William Merrill Decker is Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. Earl N. Harbert, author of The Force So Much Closer Home: Henry Adams and the Adams Family, is Professor Emeritus at Northeastern University.
