期刊名称：Rhetorical Review : The Electronic Review of Books on the History of rhetoric
印刷版ISSN：1901-2640
出版年度：2006
卷号：4
期号：01
页码：24-30
出版社：Pernille Harsting
摘要：With the exception of a few brief studies of letter-writing manuals in English, twentieth-century
scholarship on the vernacular epistle in Renaissance and Early Modern England focused on the
origins of the epistolary novel and the eighteenth-century familiar letter or on the letters of such
major literary figures as John Milton. While these areas of scholarship are by no means
exhausted, in the 1980s focus began to shift to the cultural contexts of letter writing, especially
court politics and rhetoric, gender, and the organization and material conditions of a preindustrial
society. Key studies include David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order (1980);
Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege (1984); Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter (1990);
and Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (1993). A. R. Braunmuller, editor of A
Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book: A Facsimile Edition of Folger MS. V.a. 321 (University of
Delaware Press, 1983), wrote a seminal article on the social significance of epistolary formats,
and feminist conferences, essay collections, and editions began examining the letter as a genre
of writing open to women. The last five years of the twentieth century saw publication of, on
average, at least two monographs each year that pay significant attention to letter writing in
English: Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper (1996); C. John Sommerville, The
News Revolution in England (1996); Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII
(1997); Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes (1998); Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility (1998);
Philip Beale, A History of the Post in England (1998); Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print
(1999); Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue (1999); Susan Whyman,
Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England (1999); and Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact
(2000); not to mention editions of letters and collections of essays about them.
