Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860 (review)

Until very recently, the letter either has been put in a corner or stuffed in a box into which it did not fit; when not ignored completely, it has been classified as sort-of-but-not-quite autobiography, a fragmented history text, a work of incomplete nonfiction. Unlike scholars of French, Italian, and British literature, critics of American literature largely have overlooked letter writing as an important means of authorship worthy of study in its own right. The few exceptions to this trend usually discuss only those epistles associated with established writers (particularly those who belong to the canon), and they often do so to gain larger insight into the author's other works of prose or poetry. Although William Merrill Decker's Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, published in 1998, called for scholarly considerations of American letter writing, this invitation to examine a genre rife with potential was met with relative silence. That silence, thankfully, was broken by Elizabeth Hewitt's Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 in 2004 and Eve Tavor Bannet's Empire of Letters: Letter Manual and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 in 2005. These works built the foundation for a conversation that explores how American epistolography transcended borders of genre and national identity, a conversation that culminates in Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760—1860, edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris.

Gaul, Harris, and the book's contributors set out to prove that "eighteenth-and nineteenth-century correspondents conceived of the letter as a literary genre worthy of study, emulation, and practice," and they achieve that goal (2). Their approach to letter-writing is novel and significant because it finally gives epistolography its due, convincingly arguing that letters warrant their own careful consideration. A rich and fruitful discussion ensues concerning how letters challenge notions of genre and authorship, disrupting "limiting binaries of public/private, written/oral, or print/ manuscript," which is the collection's greatest strength (2).

The book spans letter writing from the eve of the American Revolution to the years just before the Civil War. It is divided into four parts: "Letters and Transnationalism," which explores letters written beyond America's national borders; "Letters and Authorship," which discusses letter writers who actively sought publication; "Letters and Periodicals," which examines how letters influenced print culture; and "Letters and Twenty-First Century Editions," which details the preparation and publication of letters today. The book benefits from including these multiple approaches to letter writing. Bannet, for example, brings her knowledge of letter-writing manuals to the evaluation of the epistolary genre, while Jeffrey H. Richards provides his point of view as the textual editor of Mercy Otis Warren's correspondence. All of the contributors perform the oft-neglected task of both contextualizing and analyzing the art and prose of the letters they study, rather than discussing only the correspondences' content, proving that letters are indeed "texts to be lingered over, pondered, and carefully interpreted" (100). The 100-year scope initially may be seen as a weakness, since letter writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved variegated cultural constructs. The collection might have benefited from being divided into two volumes, one for each century, in order for the nuances of each era to be fully appreciated. The broad time span, however, allows readers to recognize patterns within the construction and use of American letters during the years when they provided the single most vital, popular form of communication.

Letters and Cultural Transformations proves that when we read correspondence as a genre worthy of independent study, we will be forced to expand our definitions of authorship, art, and identity. The collection, for example, includes letters by an Italian émigré (Philip Mazzei), a female British historian (Catharine Macaulay), travelers to Puerto Rico and Cuba (the Emersons and Peabodies of New England), a Cherokee woman (Catharine Brown), black slaves (John Brown, Harriet Jacobs), and free black women (Rebecca Primus, Addie...