Emotions and the Letter: A History from Antiquity to the Present: History of Emotions Katie Barclay Bloomsbury Academic

Emotions and the Letter

A History from Antiquity to the Present

Emotions and the Letter

A History from Antiquity to the Present

Description

From hate mail to suicide notes to begging letters, this book explores the relationship between letter writing and emotion through case studies from antiquity to the 21st century. It shows how the epistolary form has offered a wide range of ways to communicate private feelings, make public statements and offers a rich historical source to explore how people have performed emotions for a range of audiences.

Emotions and the Letter shows how this long-standing historical source can provide insights into a diversity of emotion traditions. Uses of the letter in different periods and its emotional potential reflect important interactions between individuals and society, private and public, aesthetics and authenticity. Applying approaches and methods from the history of emotions, literary studies and affect studies, this collection significantly advances our understanding of why letters remain a critical mode of communication and explores how to analyse letters for historical emotions research.

Emotion and the Letter: an Introduction, Katie Barclay and Diana G. Barnes, (University of Adelaide and University of New England, Australia)
1. Rumination, Resentment and Repetition: Latin Epistolarity and the Performance of Difficult Emotion, Ruth Morello (University of Manchester, UK)
2. Gender and the Familial Letter in Joseon Korea, Susan Broomhall (Australian Catholic University, Australia)
3. Letters as Emotional Evidence in Early Modern England: Francis Bacon's printed Apologie and his manuscript letterbook, Alan Stewart (Columbia University, USA)
4. Epistolary Technologies of Separation and Archives of Emotion, James Daybell (Plymouth University, UK)
5. This is Not a Letter: A Sympathetic Story of Epistolary Fiction, 1520-1992, Diana G. Barnes (University of New England, Australia)
6. Suicide Notes in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Towards a Conflicted Genre, Eric Parisot (Flinders University, Australia)
7. Petitions and Requests: the Art of Persuading the Powerful in Eighteenth-Century United Kingdom, Katie Barclay (University of Adelaide, Australia)
8. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Animal Epistolarities: or, the Expression of Emotion in Women and Animals, Jennifer Ann McDonell (University of New England, Australia)
9. Letters to Heaven: Writing Religious Emotions in Twentieth-Century Europe, Vesna Drapac (University of Adelaide, Australia)
10. Readers' Letters to Irish and British Magazines 1958-69: a Comparative Study, Catriona Clear (National University of Ireland, Galway)
11. Hate Mail in Late Twentieth-Century USA, Prudence Flowers (Flinders University, Australia)
12. Cinematic Letters: Letter Writing in the Films of Pedro Costa, Thomas Moran (Monash University, Australia)

Bibliography
Notes

Product details

Published	Oct 16 2025
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Extent	272
ISBN	9781350345171
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations	10 bw illus
Series	History of Emotions
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

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.

Ute Frevert, Professor of History and Director em. at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
This collection will be of major value to scholars and students working across the history of emotions and literature. The essays address an impressive range of examples, from Cicero to Langston Hughes, demonstrating the centrality of emotion to the epistolary genre and the ways in which both change over time. Emotions and the Letter offers genuine new insight into the place of the letter in human culture.

Anne Sophie Refskou, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Denmark