Elizabeth Hewitt uncovers the centrality of letter-writing to
antebellum American literature. She argues that many canonical
American authors turned to the epistolary form as an idealised
genre through which to consider the challenges of American
democracy before the Civil War. The letter was the vital technology
of social intercourse in the nineteenth century and was adopted as
an exemplary genre in which authors from Crevecoeur and Adams
through Jefferson, to Emerson, Melville, Dickinson and Whitman,
could theorise the social and political themes that were so crucial
to their respective literary projects. They interrogated the
political possibilities of social intercourse through the practice
and analysis of correspondence. Hewitt argues that although
correspondence is generally only conceived as a biographical
archive, it must instead be understood as a significant genre
through which these early authors made sense of social and
political relations in the new nation.
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