The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English: A Pragmatic Approach (review)

The register/genre ‘letter’ with its numerous subdivisions into ‘personal/familiar letter’, ‘business letter’, ‘love letter’, and so forth has a long and interesting history of more than 4000 years and has taken center stage in a number of linguistic studies, workshops, and even whole conferences. Susan Fitzmaurice’s book appears to be the latest addition to the rapidly growing number of publications on the topic. The book consists of seven chapters, preceded by a general introduction and followed by a concluding note, references, and a general index.

This study principally concentrates on the Early Modern English period, from roughly 1650 to 1750, and on the pragmatics of letter writing and reading during the period. Yet in her introduction, F describes her ultimate goal as the development of a framework or ‘robust set of techniques’ (13) that will enable researchers to describe and analyze implicit meaning independent of the mode or temporal or cultural context of a given text. The introduction also sketches a number of major characteristics of this study. Among these are its theoretical relevance to both linguistics and literature, its eclectic use of methods and theories from both of these disciplines, as well as its concern with both the production and interpretation of (implicit) meaning. The last distinction also gives structure to the book: Chs. 1–3 lay the theoretical foundation for the pragmatic analyses to follow (Ch. 1 deals mainly with implied meaning and its encoding/decoding in general, Ch. 2 with deixis, and Ch. 3 with speech act theory); Chs. 4 and 5 turn to the pragmatics of letter writing in the Early Modern English period; and Chs. 6 and 7 concentrate on the recipient side of letter writing. F describes and analyzes the role of the addressee as interlocutor through letters as ‘quintessentially reflexive’ texts and through the replies that letters as an interactive genre provoke. Her question is, specifically, What part(s) of a given letter do addressees take up in their response? Interestingly, the correspondence chosen by F, between Lady Mary Pierrepont and Edward Wortley, shows writers and readers of letters to be not prototypically cooperative, as is commonly assumed, but rather constantly fighting for power in a generally problematic and shifting relationship.

The concluding note again addresses the question of what is ‘on the lines’ and ‘between the lines’. F stresses that letters are a notoriously evasive genre that resists ready analyses and classifications. However, given the pragmatic techniques discussed in the book, certain (implied) meanings generated in letters and other texts become ‘feasible’ and interpretable in scientific enquiries (and, of course, to the reader of the texts in question, albeit on a more intuitive basis).

The book is well-written and well-edited and contains a number of interesting and valuable ‘gimmicks’, including ten period portraits of authors discussed as well as sample letters in the appendices to Chs. 5–7. The style is mostly jargon free and very accessible for readerships in both linguistics and literature. This study is a significant contribution to the research on the register/genre ‘letter’ and will have some impact within and between both linguistics and literature.