The Epistolary Moment

The eighteenth-century verse epistle, argues William Dowling, was an attempt to solve in literary terms the dilemma of solipsism as raised by Locke and Hume. The focus of The Epistolary Moment is on internal audience in poetry--the audience "inside" the poem, created by its discourse and belonging to its world--as this divides in epistolary poetry into a double or simultaneous register of address: the audience directly addressed by the letter-writer, and an epistolary audience listening in on the exchange from a point external to the discourse of the speaker but internal to the discourse of the poem. Epistolary audience lies, contends The Epistolary Moment, at the heart of an Augustan theory of poetry as ideological intervention, poems as symbolic acts with enormous consequences in the domain of the real. The emergence of the verse epistle as the dominant form in eighteenth-century poetry thus takes as its ultimate context the origins of eighteenth-century solipsism in a degraded modernity symbolized by Sir Robert Walpole and his Robinocracy, the demonic representatives of a new money or market society arising from the ruins of organic or traditional community. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

The epistolary novel is a form which has been neglected in most accounts of the development of the novel. This book argues that the way that the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel. Critics have drawn a distinction between the self at the time of writing and the self at the time at which events or emotions were experienced. This book demonstrates that the tensions within consciousness are the result of a continual interaction between the two selves of the letter-writer and charts the oscillation between these two selves in the epistolary novels of, amongst others, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith.

A comprehensive look at the use of imaginary letters in Greek literature, first published in 2001.

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.

The eighteenth-century verse epistle, argues William Dowling, was an attempt to solve in literary terms the dilemma of solipsism as raised by Locke and Hume. The focus of The Epistolary Moment is on internal audience in poetry--the audience inside the poem, created by its discourse and belonging to its world--as this divides in epistolary poetry into a double or simultaneous register of address: the audience directly addressed by the letter-writer, and an epistolary audience listening in on the exchange from a point external to the discourse of the speaker but internal to the discourse of the poem. Epistolary audience lies, contends The Epistolary Moment, at the heart of an Augustan theory of poetry as ideological intervention, poems as symbolic acts with enormous consequences in the domain of the real. The emergence of the verse epistle as the dominant form in eighteenth-century poetry thus takes as its ultimate context the origins of eighteenth-century solipsism in a degraded modernity symbolized by Sir Robert Walpole and his Robinocracy, the demonic representatives of a new money or market society arising from the ruins of organic or traditional community.

This book revolves around epistolary narratives of women political theorists and activists, following traces of Hannah Arendt’s philosophical approaches to love and agonistic politics. Arend’s interlocutors are four revolutionary women in the long durée of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and the USA: the romantic socialist Désirée Véret-Gay, the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, the anarchist Emma Goldman and the labour activist Rose Pesotta. The book’s central argument is that Arendt’s philosophical thought can throw light on dangerous liaisons between love, gender and agonistic politics, further making connections with feminist ruminations around love as an existential force in the ephemeral constitution of the female self in modernity. Drawing on extended research with physical, digital and published archival collections, the book responds to the challenges of ‘the digital turn’ and highlights the importance of memory work, as a way of understanding the lasting effects of the past on the present. As such, Epistolary Narratives of Love, Gender and Agonistic Politics will appeal to scholars of sociology and gender studies with interests in research methods—particularly archival methods—the work of Arendt, feminist thought and memory studies.

Epistolary Narratives presents detailed literary readings of a wide range of Greek literary letter collections across a range of genres, cultural backgrounds, and time periods, leading collectively towards a better appreciation of Greek epistolary collections as a unique literary phenomenon.