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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Prologue: Networks of Nineteenth-Century Letter-Writing -- Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing -- Part I: Material, Social, and Institutional Contexts -- 1. From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens, and the Materiality of Letter-Writing -- 2. The Business of Letter-Writing -- 3. Name and Address: Letters and Mass Mailing in Nineteenth-Century America -- 4. Paper Evidence: Handwriting, Print, Letters, and the Law -- 5. Nineteenth-Century American Science and the Decline of Letters -- 6. The Means and the End: Letters and the Work of History -- 7. Letters, Telegrams, News -- 8. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth-Century -- 9. The Spider and the Dumpling: Threatening Letters in Nineteenth-Century America -- Part II: Travel, Migration, and Dislocation -- 10. Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now -- 11. Working Away, Writing Home -- 12. Letters from America: Themes and Methods in the Study of Irish Emigrant Correspondence -- 13. The Usual Problems: Sickness, Distance, and Failure to Acculturate in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Letters -- 14. Indigenous Epistolarity in the Nineteenth Century -- 15. Dueling Epistles: Enslaved Letter-Writers and the Discourse of (Dis)Honor -- 16. Home and Belonging in the Letters of Sarah Hicks Williams -- 17. 'An Oblique Place': Letters in the Civil War -- 18. Social Action in Cross-Regional Letter-Writing: Ednah Cheney's Correspondence with Postbellum Teachers in the U.S. South -- Part III: Politics, Reform, and Intellectual Life -- 19. Founding Friendship: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the American Experiment in Republican Government, 1812-26 -- 20. Corresponding Natures: Ralph Waldo Emerson's Letters -- 21. 'This Epistolary Medium': Friendship and Civil Society in Margaret Fuller's Private Letters -- 22. 'Will You live?': Thoreau's Philosophical Letters -- 23. 'Frederick Douglass, the Freeman' and 'Frederick Bailey, the Slave': Private versus Public Acts and Arts of Letter-Writing in Frederick Douglass's Pre-Civil-War Correspondence -- 24. Old Master Letters and Letters from the Old World: Julia Griffi ths and the Uses of Correspondence in Frederick Douglass's Newspapers -- 25. Letters from 'Linda Brent': Harriet Jacobs and the Work of Emancipation -- 26. Abraham Lincoln: The Man through His Letters -- 27. Between Science and Aesthetics: The Letters of William James -- 28. 'My Dear Dr.': American Women and Nineteenth-Century Scientifi c Correspondence -- 29. 'A Chain of Correspondence': Social Activism and Civic Values in the Letters of Lydia Sigourney -- 30. A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Epistles -- 31. 'The Stamp of Truth': Historiographical Dissent and Its Limits in the Letters of Jared Sparks -- 32. Defenses and Masks and Poses in Henry Adams' Letters -- Part IV: Literary Culture -- 33. The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown: Epistolary Performance and New Paths for Scholarship -- 34. Publishing and Public Affairs in the Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper -- 35. The Transatlantic Village: The Rise and Fall of the Epistolary Friendship of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Mary Russell Mitford -- 36. The Literary Professional and the Country Gentleman: The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe and Philip Pendleton Cooke -- 37. Melville's Flummery -- 38. The Epistolary Romance and Rivalry of Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne -- 39. Co-Responding with Walt Whitman -- 40. 'Rare Sparkles of Light': Intimacy and Distance in Emily Dickinson's Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson -- 41. 'Soul Friends': Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lady Byron in Correspondence -- 42. Louisa May Alcott's Family Post Box -- 43. Profanities, Indecencies, and Theologies: Mark Twain's Letters to Joseph Twichell, William Dean Howells, and Henry Rogers -- 44. Charles W. Chesnutt's Letters: 'The Vaguely Defi ned Line Where Races Meet' -- 45. Sarah Orne Jewett's Foreign Correspondence -- 46. 'Too Intimate to Publish, Too Rare to Suppress': Henry James in His Letters -- 47. 'Ill Correspondent': Stephen Crane's Trouble with Letters -- Notes on Contributors -- Index Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writingGBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup(['ISBN:9780748692927','ISBN:9780748692934','ISBN:9780748692941']);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.Key FeaturesDraws together different emphases on the intellectual, literary and social uses of letter writing Provides students and researchers with a means to situate letters in their wider theoretical and historical contextsMethodologically expansive, intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academicsOffers 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"
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