Letters and the Body, 1700-1830: Writing and Embodiment

This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women and men’s letters in Britain, North America and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite.

In eleven chapters, scholars from various disciplines draw on different methodological approaches that include close readings of single letters, social historical analyses of large corpora and a material culture approach to the object of the letter. This research includes personal letters exchanged among family and friends, formal correspondence and letters that were incorporated into published forewords and appendices, journals and memoirs. Section 1 explores the letter as a substitute for the absent body, the imagined physical encounters and performances envisaged by letter writers and the means through which these imagined sensations were conveyed. Section 2 examines the letter as a material object that served as a conduit for descriptions of the material body and as an instrument for embodied encounters. Section 3 focuses on how correspondents purposefully used their bodies in letters as a means to create intimacy, to generate social networks and build a ‘body politic’.

This interdisciplinary volume centred around letters will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of fields including eighteenth-century studies, cultural history and literature.