Letter Writing as a Social Practice
Editors
This book explores the social significance of letter writing. Letter writing is one of the most pervasive literate activities in human societies, crossing formal and informal contexts. Letters are a common text type, appearing in a wide variety of forms in most domains of life. More broadly, the importance of letter writing can be seen in that the phenomenon has been widespread historically, being one of earliest forms of writing, and a wide range of contemporary genres have their roots in letters. The writing of a letter is embedded in a particular social situation, and like all other types of literacy objects and events, the activity gains its meaning and significance from being situated in cultural beliefs, values, and practices. This book brings together anthropologists, historians, educators and other social scientists, providing a range of case studies that explore aspects of the socially situated nature of letter writing.
[Studies in Written Language and Literacy, 9] 2000. vi, 262 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
-
1. IntroductionDavid Barton and Nigel Hall | p. 1
-
2. Letters and the Social Grounding of Differentiated GenresCharles Bazerman | p. 15
-
3. The Familiar Letter and Social Refinement in America, 1750–1800Konstantin Dierks | p. 31
-
4. Letter Writing in a Cornish Community in the 1790sFrances O. Austin | p. 43
-
5. English Pauper Letters 1800–34, and the English LanguageTony Fairman | p. 63
-
6. The Materiality of Letter Writing: A nineteenth century perspectiveNigel Hall | p. 83
-
7. Letter-Writing Instruction in 19th Century Schools in the United StatesLucille M. Schultz | p. 109
-
8. Young Children’s Explorations of Letter WritingNigel Hall, Anne Robinson and Leslie Crawford | p. 131
-
9. Death Row Penfriends: Some Effects of Letter Writing on Identity and RelationshipsJanet Maybin | p. 151
-
10. ‘Absolute Truly Brill to See From You’: Visuality and Prisoners’ LettersAnita Wilson | p.
-
11. True Traces: Love Letters and Social Transformation in NepalLaura M. Ahearn | p. 199
-
12. Teaching Letters: The Recontextualisation of Letter-Writing Practices in Literacy Classes for Unschooled Adults in South AfricaCatherine Kell | p. 209
-
13. Computer-Mediated Communication: The Future of the Letter?Simeon J. Yates | p. 233
-
Author biographies | p. 253
-
Index of Names | p. 257
-
Index of Subjects | p. 259
“Barton and Hall's book is a hallmark example of the New Literacies Studies. A variety of careful studies of letter writing as realized in different local and situated practices illuminates a bevy of important theoretical issues dealing with the history of literacy, cultural change, the development of different genres in science and everyday life, the negotiation and renegotiation of identities, the nature of schools and schooling, new technologies, and the socioculturally variable workings of class, race, ethnicity, and gender.”
James Paul Gee, Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Four years ago, when I was developing the reading list for a new course in life writing, I was disappointed and surprised to find that very little research had been published on a practice so ubiquitous and so apparently everyday as writing letters. This book, then, which looks at letter writing and reading across cultures, is a much needed scholarly contribution to the study of written language and social communication. Humble as it may seem, early evidence of the letter form can be identified in all kinds of historical written transactions, including — amazingly — the Magna Carta and the US dollar. This book testifies to the flexibility and significance of letter writing as a social practice and helpfully brings together examinations of older forms of letter writing with contemporary practice including the use of e-mail.”
Dorothy Sheridan, Archivist (University of Sussex)
“The articles selected for inclusion in this book cover a diverse range of topics, representing various cultures and historical eras. However, no matter what particular subject matter is addressed by these authors, a perspective of the letter as a social practice ties all the articles together [...] Taken as a whole, these articles do indeed present a convincing argument that there are social effects of letter writing that are rarely explored in academic literature [...] Given the lack of such research in the past, this book is more than a beginning; it provides a look at the most current and relevant considerations of letters across disciplines, and is a useful addition to the libraries of those who study the social implications of personal communication.”
Jennifer L. Adams, Purdue University in The Review of Communication 2:1, 2002
Cited by (61)
Cited by 61 other publications
Kirsh, Mary Fraser
2024. Witnessing the Recovery: Storytelling and Family Building, from Belsen to Ireland. International Migration Review 
Morska, Liliya, Artur Fabiś & Dorota Gierszewski
2024. Learning in crisis: the war related perspective of poles’ epistolary narratives to Ukrainians. Cogent Arts & Humanities 11:1
Nordlund Edvinsson, Therese
2024. The game/s that men play: Male bonding in the Swedish business elite 1890–1960. Business History 66:1 ► pp. 76 ff.
Ray, Amber B & Erin FitzPatrick
2024. Instructional Coaches in Elementary Settings: Writing the Wave to Success with Self-Regulated Strategy Development for the Informational Genre. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice 39:1 ► pp. 37 ff.
Sayat, Mikayla, Tessa Morgan, Janine Wiles, Kathryn Morgan, Merryn Gott & Kumari Shweta Kalyani
2024. Older People’s Understandings and Experiences of Using Health and Social Care Services under COVID-19 Lockdown Restrictions in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Health & Social Care in the Community 2024 ► pp. 1 ff.
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria
2024. ‘My dearest Clara … my dear friend’ – Personal Names and direct address in Mary Hamilton’s private correspondence. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 10:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
McPhee, Molly
2023. The Letter Cloth: Sensory Modes of the Epistolary in Prison Theatre Practice. Humanities 12:6 ► pp. 139 ff.
Nguyen, Toan Bao & Anh Tuan Pham
2023. Proceedings of the 2023 4th International Conference on Education Development and Studies, ► pp. 97 ff.
Watts, Alison
2023. Maternal Insanity in the Family: Memories, Family Secrets, and the Mental Health Archive. Genealogy 7:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Hinsliff-Smith, Kathryn, Julie McGarry, Moreoagae Bertha Randa, Heike Bartel & Gill Langmack
2022. Use of Writing Letters and Other Literature Forms to Capture Experiences of Research Participants. In Arts Based Health Care Research: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, ► pp. 121 ff.
Mastrantonio, Monica
2022. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: the Epistolary Woman, Because Women Could Not Be Called Philosophers, Scientists, or Inventors. Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists 1:2 ► pp. 140 ff.
Prigent, Camille, Tessa Morgan, Janine Wiles, Kathryn Morgan, Lisa Williams & Merryn Gott
2022. Intergenerational Tension or Cohesion during the COVID-19 Pandemic?: A Letter-writing Study with Older New Zealanders. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 20:4 ► pp. 386 ff.
Redmond, Sean
2022. A pandemic of creative loneliness. Continuum 36:2 ► pp. 184 ff.
Wang, Pan
2022. Love during China’s Cultural Revolution: evidence from a ‘sent-down’ couple’s private letters 1968–1977. The History of the Family 27:2 ► pp. 370 ff.
Codell, Julie
2021. Victorian Artists’ Letters: Rhetoric, Networks, and Social Capital. Arts 10:4 ► pp. 73 ff.
Harding, Jennifer R
2021. Epistolary cognition: The family letters of Rosalie Calvert. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 30:1 ► pp. 37 ff.
Laughey, William F., Megan E. L. Brown, Ariel Liu, Angelique N. Dueñas & Gabrielle M. Finn
2021. Love and breakup letter methodology: A new research technique for medical education. Medical Education 55:7 ► pp. 818 ff.
Layton, Catherine
2021. Memoir/Life Writing. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing, ► pp. 1 ff.
Layton, Catherine
2022. Memoir/Life Writing. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, ► pp. 1039 ff.
Bolles, Lynn
2020. Reciprocal arrangements: The life story of “Rosalind”—Woman worker, mother, and Jamaican. Feminist Anthropology 1:2 ► pp. 260 ff.
Hollow, Matthew
2020. Historicizing entrepreneurial networks. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal 14:1 ► pp. 66 ff.
Hou, Dongchen
2020. Writing Sound: Stenography, Writing Technology, and National Modernity in China, 1890s. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 30:1 ► pp. 103 ff.
Vassiliadou, Dimitra
2020. Auto/Pathographies in situ: ‘Dying of Melancholy’ in Nineteenth-Century Greece. In The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography, ► pp. 207 ff.
Grant, Linda
2019. Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of Sixteenth-Century English Love Poetry,
Almasy, Karin
2018. The Linguistic and Visual Portrayal of Identifications in Slovenian and German Picture Postcards (1890–1920). Austrian History Yearbook 49 ► pp. 41 ff.
Colombini, Crystal Broch
2018. Composing Crisis: Hardship Letters and the Political Economies of Genre. College English 80:3 ► pp. 218 ff.
O’ Hagan, Lauren
2018. “Clean Nails are the Mark of a Well Brought-Up Girl”: Exploring Gender in a Post-Edwardian Girls’ School Exercise Book. Women's Studies 47:8 ► pp. 765 ff.
Aronis, Carolin
2017. Communicative Resurrection: Letters to the Dead in the Israeli Newspaper. Journal of Communication 67:6 ► pp. 827 ff.
D’Amore, Manuela
2017. The Fellows’ Letters from Distant Countries: New Science, the “Other” and Imperialism. In The Royal Society and the Discovery of the Two Sicilies, ► pp. 31 ff.
Meier, Ninna & Charlotte Wegener
2017. Writing With Resonance. Journal of Management Inquiry 26:2 ► pp. 193 ff.
Borges, Marcelo J. & Sonia Cancian
2016. Reconsidering the migrant letter: from the experience of migrants to the language of migrants. The History of the Family 21:3 ► pp. 281 ff.
Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo
Conde-Silvestre, J. Camilo
2022. Historical sociolinguistics. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 756 ff.
Crane, Cori
2016. Understanding and Evaluating L2 Personal Letter Writing: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Analysis of Student Texts in German. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 49:2 ► pp. 122 ff.
Howell, Jessica M.
2016. Nurse going native: Language and identity in letters from Africa and the British West Indies. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51:1 ► pp. 165 ff.
Tamboukou, Maria
2016. The autobiographical you: letters in the gendered politics of the labour movement. Journal of Gender Studies 25:3 ► pp. 269 ff.
LAMPRECHT, LOGAN M.
2015. A Phenomenological Inquiry of Clients' Experiences of Receiving a Humanistically Oriented Therapeutic Letter From Their Counselor Between Counseling Sessions. The Journal of Humanistic Counseling 54:3 ► pp. 187 ff.
Starfield, Jane
2015. Remembrance of things past and recent: Modiri Molema's letters home to Mafeking. Scrutiny2 20:1 ► pp. 76 ff.
Abraham, Juneman & Any Rufaedah
2014. “Theologization” of Psychology and “Psychologization” of Religion: How Do Psychology and Religion Supposedly Contribute to Prevent and Overcome Social Conflicts?. Procedia Environmental Sciences 20 ► pp. 516 ff.
Laitinen, Mikko & Anita Auer
2014. Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (England, c. 1750–1835). In Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English [Studies in Language Companion Series, 159], ► pp. 187 ff.
Coffman, Elesha
2012. The Measure of a Magazine: Assessing the Influence of the Christian Century. Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 22:1 ► pp. 53 ff.
Elspass, Stephan
2012. The Use of Private Letters and Diaries in Sociolinguistic Investigation. In The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 156 ff.
Stanley, Liz, Andrea Salter & Helen Dampier
2012. The Epistolary Pact, Letterness. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 27:2 ► pp. 262 ff.
Stanley, Liz, Andrea Salter & Helen Dampier
2013. The Work of Making and the Work it Does: Cultural Sociology and ‘Bringing- Into-Being’ the Cultural Assemblage of the Olive Schreiner Letters. Cultural Sociology 7:3 ► pp. 287 ff.
Madianou, Mirca & Daniel Miller
2011. Crafting Love: Letters and Cassette Tapes in Transnational Filipino Family Communication. South East Asia Research 19:2 ► pp. 249 ff.
Norhafizah, Tuan, Tuan Zakaria, Mohd Juzaiddin Ab Aziz, Tg Nor Rizan & Tg Mohd Maasum
2010. 2010 International Symposium on Information Technology, ► pp. 1199 ff.
Van Hensbergen, Claudine
2010. Towards an Epistolary Discourse: Receiving the Eighteenth‐Century Letter. Literature Compass 7:7 ► pp. 508 ff.
Herring, Susan C. & Asta Zelenkauskaite
2009. Symbolic Capital in a Virtual Heterosexual Market. Written Communication 26:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Pyle, Nathan R.
2009. Therapeutic Letters as Relationally Responsive Practice. Journal of Family Nursing 15:1 ► pp. 65 ff.
Higgitt, Rebekah & Charles W. J. Withers
2008. Science and Sociability: Women as Audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831–1901. Isis 99:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Annuk, Eve
2007. Letters as a New Approach to History: A Case Study of an Estonian Poet Ilmi Kolla (1933–1954). NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 15:1 ► pp. 6 ff.
Halldórsdóttir, Erla Hulda
2007. Fragments of Lives—The Use of Private Letters in Historical Research. NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 15:1 ► pp. 35 ff.
Halldórsdóttir, Erla Hulda
2010. The Narrative of Silence. Life Writing 7:1 ► pp. 37 ff.
Halldórsdóttir, Erla Hulda
2015. ‘Do Not Let Anyone See This Ugly Scrawling’: Literacy Practices and the Women's Household at Hallfreðarstaðir 1817–1829. Life Writing 12:3 ► pp. 289 ff.
Leskelä‐Kärki, Maarit
2007. Constructing Sisterly Relations in Epistolary Practices: The Writing Krohn Sisters (1890–1950). NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 15:1 ► pp. 21 ff.
Hamilton, Mary
2006. Just do it: Literacies, everyday learning and the irrelevance of pedagogy. Studies in the Education of Adults 38:2 ► pp. 125 ff.
Crangle, Sara
2005. SEpistolarity, audience, selfhood: the letters of dorothy osborne to william temple. Women's Writing 12:3 ► pp. 433 ff.
Nevala, Minna & Minna Palander-Collin
2005. Letters and Letter Writing: Introduction. European Journal of English Studies 9:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Ahearn, Laura M.
2001. Language and Agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30:1 ► pp. 109 ff.
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
2017. 4. Internationalistische Praktiken I: Charisma und Aktivismus zwischen Revolution und NÖP. In Das Charisma der Weltrevolution, ► pp. 220 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General