Emotions and the Letter

Katie Barclay is ARC Future Fellow and Professor in History, Macquarie University, Australia.Diana G. Barnes is Associate Professor in Literary Studies, University of New England, Australia.

We write letters, like our ancestors, for many reasons: love letters, consolation letters, suicide letters. This book reveals letter-writing as a way of doing emotion. Covering human history from the Roman period to our times, we learn about the changing taxonomies and traditions of conveying feelings through written conversation.

• Emotion and the Letter, and Introduction, Katie Barclay and Diana G. Barnes1. Rumination, Resentment and Repetition: Latin Epistolarity and the Performance of Difficult Emotion, Ruth Morello 2. Letters as Emotional Evidence in Early Modern England: Francis Bacon’s Printed Apologie and his Manuscript Letterbook, Alan Stewart 3. Epistolary Technologies of Separation and Archives of Emotion, James Daybell 4. Moving Letters between Living and Dead in Joseon Korea, Susan Broomhall 5. This is Not a Letter: A Sympathetic Story of Epistolary Fiction, 1520-1992, Diana G. Barnes 6. Beyond Despair: British Suicide Letters in the Long Eighteenth Century, Eric Parisot and Ella Sbaraini 7. Children’s Letters and Emotional Formations in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Katie Barclay 8. Letters to Heaven: Writing Religious Emotions in Twentieth-Century Europe, Vesna Drapac 9. Hate Mail in the Late-Twentieth Century USA, Prudence Flowers 10. Epistolary Cinema: Letter Writing in the Films of Pedro Costa, Thomas Moran