Gender-Based Variation in Nineteenth-Century English Letter Writing

2003 ◽  
pp. 87-106 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Gender Based

Miscegenated Whiteness: Rebecca Harding Davis, the "Civil-izing" War, and Female Racism

2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Knadler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
White Women ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
White Female ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
The Public ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender

This essay examines Rebecca Harding Davis's resistance to the Civil War discourse in the Atlantic Monthly in order to complicate the relation between nineteenth-century racism and sentimental fiction. While much revisionary work has been done on nineteenth-century women'sfiction and how it reinforced racial ideologies, the misleading question often asked is whether white women did or did not participate in the public arena of race. Yet this initial framing of the question denies the alternative possibility: that white women might have engaged in their own gendered forms of racial activity, or in a "female racism" (to use Vron Ware's term), that did not correspond to or act in complicity with a racism that is by default seen as public and masculine. By imagining her heroine as a "woman from the border" inWaiting for the Verdict (1868), Davis works to oppose and overturn a particular regional and gender-based inscription of whiteness that was being disseminated amid the war crises as an emergent New England-based national identity. In contrast, Davis creates a particular feminine and liminal version of white racial power, or a "miscegenated whiteness." But this fantasy of an imagined national community based on the "white mulatto" finally undoes itself in the novel's moments of narrative crises about a free and open female sexuality, and Davis'snovel seeks to restore the white female body to its "purity."

Mathematics in the Age of Jane Austen: Essential Skills of 1800

2000 ◽  
Vol 93 (8) ◽  
pp. 670-679
Author(s):  
S. I. B. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Meal ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Essential Skills ◽  
Sense And Sensibility

THE ACADEMY AWARD–WINNING MOVIE Sense and Sensibility presented a wonderful vision of life in early nineteenth-century England. In the absence of television, radio, movies, and videos, families sought entertainment in a manner far different from today's. The Dashwood girls—Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret—filled their days with visiting, reading, practicing the pianoforte, needleworking, and letter writing, not to mention gossiping and matchmaking. Long days were highlighted by a wonderfully relaxed midday family meal, during which conversation was paramount. Above all, Jane Austen portrays a concern for the thoughts and feelings of one's immediate acquaintances and pride in one's village.

scholarly journals Correspondence manuals in nineteenth-century Greater Syria: between the arzuhalci and the advent of popular letter writing

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuval Ben-Bassat ◽  
Fruma Zachs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact

This article is based on several editions of a recently located letter writing manual by Yusuf Efendi al-Shalfun (1839-95). This booklet provides a new perspective on a period in which the practice of ‘popular’ letter-writing was expanding in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire. Little research has been devoted thus far to the implications of the increase in the ability to write (in contradistinction to the ability to read), in the empire’s Arab provinces in the second half of the nineteenth century. Popular correspondence, both personal and more formal, gradually developed among the Arab urban literate population, who used manuals such as the one written by al-Shalfun as guides to write in various official, social, and familial situations. Letter writing thus complemented the work of the arzuhalcis, the professional letter and petition writers in the Ottoman empire. This paper examines the impact of popular letter writing in Greater Syria in the second half of the nineteenth century as well as the public’s ability at the time to communicate through writing.

Poe

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Lesley Ginsberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Public Cultures ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Performed Identities ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches Poe’s life through his letters with reference to historical contexts that shaped letter writing in antebellum America, Poe’s interests in handwriting and “Autography,” the relationship between letter writing and antebellum authorship and celebrity, and shifts in Poe’s voice across multiple letters and recipients. In his letters, Poe performed identities ranging from the wronged son, the victim, the lover, and the literary genius. Poe’s epistolary “rhetoric of dread” may be linked to his lyric poetry. As scholars of letter writing in the nineteenth-century United States attest, letters were not “private documents.” Rather, they were “self-conscious” artifacts “circulating between friends and strangers.” Poe’s letters were written when the distinctions between privately circulated manuscripts and public cultures of print were destabilized. His letters to women are studied in this chapter as is the issue of poverty haunting his letters. Finally, Poe’s letters also document his desire for editorship of a magazine and his participation in the business of publishing in antebellum America.

Frances Ridley Havergal’s Theology of Nature

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 319-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Atherstone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Spiritual Transformation ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Holiness Movement ◽  
Lake District ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Short Space ◽  
Devotional Writings ◽  
Home Territory

Historians of the nineteenth-century Keswick holiness movement have long observed, though seldom analysed, its theological appropriation of the natural world. With annual conventions held from 1875 in the Lake District, home territory of Wordsworth and Southey, the movement’s love of nature was one of its most obvious ‘Romantic afFinities’ and marked it out from other streams of contemporary Evangelicalism, as David Bebbington has recendy shown. Yet much of the early theological inspiration behind the Keswick Convention was drawn not from the Lake Poets, but from the devotional writings of Victorian England’s best-known evangelical poet, Frances Ridley Havergal. The Keswick emphases upon absolute surrender to God and ‘entire consecration’ in his service, with a deep christocentric piety and a passion for spiritual transformation, pervade her teaching. Although Havergal’s brief career lasted only two decades, being cut short by her untimely death in June 1879 at the age of 42, her output was prodigious. Alongside indefatigable letter-writing and the production of numerous evangelistic booklets, she published several collections of poetry and hymnody in a short space of time, notably The Ministry of Song (1869), Under the Surface (1874), Loyal Responses (1878) and, posthumously, Under His Shadow (1879). Her popular hymns, such as ‘Take My Life’ and ‘Like a River Glorious’, became synonymous with Keswick spirituality.

scholarly journals "What Has Become of Jimmy Thornton?": The Rhetoric(s) of Letter-Writing at The New York State Asylum for Idiots, 1855-1866

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zosha Stuckey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
New York State ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
York State ◽  
Rhetorical Action ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History And Theory

<p>This article looks to the genre of letter-writing and to epistolary rhetoric in order to recover perspectives seemingly lost amongst the medicalized discourse of asylum histories. These hard-to-find letters written in the nineteenth century by pupils, family members, and teachers open us up to new perspectives not available in other archival documents. I give a brief introduction to the history and theory of epistolary rhetoric, delimit a disability epistolary, and then consider a group of letters in terms of the rhetorical action they perform. I conclude by emphasizing the significance of this cross-disciplinary work for both rhetoric and disability studies.</p>

Letter Writing Among Poets

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Art Form

This is the first book to look at poets’ letters as an art form. Fifteen enlightening chapters by leading international biographers, critics and poets examine letter writing among poets in the last 200 years. Poets discussed include Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley in the nineteenth century and Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth. Divided into three sections—Contexts and Issues, Romantic and Victorian Letter Writing and Twentieth-Century Letter Writing—the volume demonstrates that real letters still have an allure that virtual post struggles to replicate.

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