Letters

Title
Letters
Publication Date
2025-01-20
Author(s)
Barnes, Diana G
( Author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3923-603X
Email: dbarne26@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:dbarne26
Editor
Editor(s): Nicholas McDowell and Henry Power
Type of document
Book Chapter
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Place of publication
Oxford, United Kingdom
DOI
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198746843.013.22
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/72302
Abstract

Over the 1640s a number of cabinets of private (friendship and love) letters were published, many without the permission of the authors. These publications divided traditional loyalties and established new ones. In the 1650s, during the Interregnum, the letter's association with classical stoicism (Cicero and Seneca) provided the ideal foundations for articulating covert royalism. At the Restoration, print letters served to document recent history with a personal twist. Over the 1670s and 1680s love letters came into vogue. These novelistic and digressive collections rework the passionate terms of the verse epistle to address contemporary political scandal. From the 1690s, letters in serialized journals drew readers into a public sphere of debate, and modelled their responsibilities within it. The following chapter surveys the epistolary subspecies that dominated the print marketplace. In closing, it spotlights three epistolary agents: a publisher (Humphrey Moseley), an author (Margaret Cavendish), and a reader (of the Tatler).

Link
Citation
The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714, p. 379-399
ISBN
9780198746843
9780198940470
Start page
379
End page
399

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