Cultures of Letters

Cultures of Letters
Author: Richard H. Brodhead
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226075266

Richard H. Brodhead uses a great variety of historical sources, many of them considered here for the first time, to reconstruct the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of the post-Civil War decades, and the literary culture of post-emancipation black education. Moving across a range of writers familiar and unfamiliar, and relating groups of writers often considered in artificial isolation, Brodhead describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for the authors who inhabited them.

Law and Letters in American Culture

Law and Letters in American Culture
Author: Robert A. Ferguson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1984
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780674514652

The role of religion in early American literature has been endlessly studied; the role of the law has been virtually ignored. Robert A. Ferguson's book seeks to correct this imbalance. With the Revolution, Ferguson demonstrates, the lawyer replaced the clergyman as the dominant intellectual force in the new nation. Lawyers wrote the first important plays, novels, and poems; as gentlemen of letters they controlled many of the journals and literary societies; and their education in the law led to a controlling aesthetic that shaped both the civic and the imaginative literature of the early republic. An awareness of this aesthetic enables us to see works as diverse as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and Irving's burlesque History of New York as unified texts, products of the legal mind of the time. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the great political orations were written by lawyers, and so too were the literary works of Trumbull, Tyler, Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and a dozen other important writers. To recover the original meaning and context of these writings is to gain new understanding of a whole era of American culture. The nexus of law and letters persisted for more than a half-century. Ferguson explores a range of factors that contributed to its gradual dissolution: the yielding of neoclassicism to romanticism; the changing role of the writer; the shift in the lawyer's stance from generalist to specialist and from ideological spokesman to tactician of compromise; the onslaught of Jacksonian democracy and the problems of a country torn by sectional strife. At the same time, he demonstrates continuities with the American Renaissance. And in Abraham Lincoln he sees a memorable late flowering of the earlier tradition.

A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture

A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 998
Release: 2015-05-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004292128

A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture is the first publication, in any language, that is dedicated to the study of Chinese epistolary literature and culture in its entirety, from the early empire to the twentieth century. The volume includes twenty-five essays dedicated to a broad spectrum of topics from postal transmission to letter calligraphy, epistolary networks to genre questions. It introduces dozens of letters, often the first translations into English, and thus makes epistolary history palpable in all its vitality and diversity: letters written by men and women from all walks of life to friends and lovers, princes and kings, scholars and monks, seniors and juniors, family members and neighbors, potential patrons, newspaper editors, and many more. With contributions by: Pablo Ariel Blitstein, R. Joe Cutter, Alexei Ditter, Ronald Egan, Imre Galambos, Natascha Gentz, Enno Giele, Natasha Heller, David R. Knechtges, Paul W. Kroll, Jie Li, Y. Edmund Lien, Bonnie S. McDougall, Amy McNair, David Pattinson, Zeb Raft, Antje Richter, Anna M. Shields, Suyoung Son, Janet Theiss, Xiaofei Tian, Lik Hang Tsui, Matthew Wells, Ellen Widmer, and Suzanne E. Wright.

Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts

Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts
Author: Christopher K. Ho
Publisher:
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2021-02-24
Genre: Asian American artists
ISBN: 9781736507902

This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experiences of Asian-American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. The form of the letter offers readers intimate insights into the complexities of Asian American experiences, moving beyond the model-minority myth. Chronicling everyday lives, dreams, rage, family histories, and cultural politics, these letters ignite new ways of being, and modes of creating, at a moment of racial reckoning.

The Republic of Letters

The Republic of Letters
Author: Dena Goodman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801481741

Goodman chronicles the story of the Republic of Letters from its earliest formation through major periods of change: the production of the Encyclopedia, the proliferation of a print culture that widened circles of readership beyond the control of salon governance, and the early years of the French Revolution.

Playful Letters

Playful Letters
Author: Erika Mary Boeckeler
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2017-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1609384741

Alphabetic letters are ubiquitous, multivalent, and largely ignored. Playful Letters reveals their important cultural contributions through Alphabetics—a new interpretive model for understanding artistic production that attends to the signifying interplay of the graphemic, phonemic, lexical, and material capacities of letters. A key period for examining this interplay is the century and a half after the invention of printing, with its unique media ecology of print, manuscript, sound, and image. Drawing on Shakespeare, anthropomorphic typography, figured letters, and Cyrillic pedagogy and politics, this book explores the ways in which alphabetic thinking and writing inform literature and the visual arts, and it develops reading strategies for the “letterature” that underwrites such cultural production. Playful Letters begins with early modern engagements with the alphabet and the human body—an intersection where letterature emerges with startling force. The linking of letters and typography with bodies produced a new kind of literacy. In turn, educational habits that shaped letter learning and writing permeated the interrelated practices of typography, orthography, and poetry. These mutually informing processes render visible the persistent crumbling of words into letters and their reconstitution into narrative, poetry, and image. In addition to providing a rich history of literary and artistic alphabetic interrogation in early modern Western Europe and Russia, Playful Letters contributes to the continuous story of how people use new technologies and media to reflect on older forms, including the alphabet itself.

A Companion to American Literature

A Companion to American Literature
Author: Susan Belasco
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 1864
Release: 2020-04-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1119653355

A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.

Letters to ONE

Letters to ONE
Author: Craig M. Loftin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2012-09-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438442998

Long before the Stonewall riots, ONE magazine—the first openly gay magazine in the United States—offered a positive viewpoint of homosexuality and encouraged gay people to resist discrimination and persecution. Despite a limited monthly circulation of only a few thousand, the magazine influenced the substance, character, and tone of the early American gay rights movement. This book is a collection of letters written to the magazine, a small number of which were published in ONE, but most of them were not. The letters candidly explore issues such as police harassment of gay and lesbian communities, antigay job purges, and the philosophical, scientific, and religious meanings of homosexuality.

Purloined Letters

Purloined Letters
Author: Mark H. Silver
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2008-04-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0824831888

No further information has been provided for this title.