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  • The Literary Work of Editing Letters
  • Elizabeth Hewitt
Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters. Edited by Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. xxxiv + 279 pp. $44.95.
Little Women Abroad: The Alcott Sisters' Letters from Europe, 1870–1871. Edited by Daniel Shealy. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. lxxix + 291pp. $34.95.
The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited by Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. xxviii + 368 pp. $60.00.

It has become de rigueur to describe the youngest generation of writers as the purveyors of a new literacy. They undoubtedly write more than their parents, even as their writing largely consists of hieroglyphic symbols (r u 4real? or lol) composed hastily with thumbs on TicTac-sized buttons. The popularity and cultural significance of this new communicative mode ought to remind us of the new literacy of the post-Enlightenment age, when epistolary writing was central to an increasing number of the world's population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of us do not often write letters on paper, but once they were as crucial to social communication as the ubiquitous text message is today. Perhaps the very fact that the old-fashioned letter is in its death throes explains literary scholarship's current fascination with this increasingly antiquarian art form.

Of course, scholars have long been invested in the importance of epistolary writing: Letter collections always have been a mainstay of scholarly editions. [End Page 271] Indeed, one would be hard pressed to identify a canonical author for whom there is not at least one volume of selected correspondence. Such volumes, however, traditionally have been conceived as treasure troves of biographical information: They were the textual repositories of hidden details about youthful lives, artistic temperaments, compositional practices, or business negotiations. And even when letters are read as literary documents and not as biography or history, the predominant tendency has been to read correspondence as a laboratory for the more sophisticated literary output that defined any given author's oeuvre—the lyric, the essay, the novel.

Even the very good scholarship that followed in the aftermath of Janet Gurkin Altman's foundational book, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, focused on the genre's relation to other literary modes (most often the epistolary novel) and not on the formal requirements of the letter per se.1 This prevailing sentiment toward correspondence has shifted substantially in the last decade, and we see increasing attention to epistolary writing as a literary genre in its own right.2 Attending to the unique formal requirements of epistolary writing, as well as the material practices and institutions involved in epistolary delivery, recent scholarship argues for the centrality of letters as both social practice and literary art. And what authors of such scholarship discover are the unique complexities of epistolary writing that disturb some of the conventional dichotomies by which we have conceived of both letters and literature. For example, while letters constitute a kind of autobiographical writing, they are not necessarily aimed at self-disclosure and can just as often be fashioned toward self-obfuscation or mendacity. While letters are deemed private writing insofar as they most often are unpublished, they are always written with an eye toward audience, and sometimes that audience could be quite large and diverse. While letters are frequently the vehicles for tender sentiment—of love or consolation—these intimate speech acts often took the most ritualized and conventional of forms. Attending to the nuances and complexities of epistolary writing, scholars have begun to realize that epistolary composition requires its own scholarly vocabulary.

This new understanding allows us to see the new uses to which both old volumes and old manuscripts can be put. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson's letters are of interest not just because they give access to transcendental personality, but also because we can see his epistolary practice as a generic negotiation of social theory. The published and manuscript letters of the Cherokee writer Catherine Brown, as Theresa Strouth Gaul argues, reveal her "navigation of social hierarchies" (141).3 Such new understanding of the epistolary mode has opened new possibilities for...

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