The Journal of Epistolary Studies
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| ISSN | 2577-820X |
| OpenAlex | S4210240194 |
| MAG | 4210240194 |
| Total publications | 16 |
| Coverage period | 2020 - 2025 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Impact factor | 0.167 |
This journal focuses on the study of letters and correspondence, which can intersect with cultural history, literary studies, and the anthropology of communication. It is a cognate humanities venue with potential, though not central, anthropological intersection
Australian History and Society · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Byzantine Studies and History · Chinese history and philosophy · Classical Antiquity Studies · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy
“Rouse her to independence”
This paper explores the correspondences between the cult of motherhood and the conventions of maternal education in three series of fictional letters and Mary Hays’s early feminist novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799). In late eighteenth-century novels mothers are notably absent; their stories are mediated through letters and memoirs. Letters with advice and guidance from absent mothers or maternal surrogates to daughters were also a staple eleme…
Pen Pals and Pedagogy
Often considered a lost art, letter writing can be a useful instrument that allows college students to make connections with the subjects they study in the classroom. Although most social institutions have become digital and conduct the majority of their communications through paperless mechanisms, handwritten letters remain a primary mode of communication in correctional facilities (detention centers, jails, and prisons). This communication can …
Fighting against Time
Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) is one of the most important Florentine historians, thinkers, and statesmen of the Renaissance era. A friend of the more famous Niccolò Machiavelli, Guicciardini was very active during the period of the Italian Wars when the great European monarchies were fighting over Italian territory. Between the French defeat at Pavia on February 24, 1525, and the signing of the League of Cognac on May 22, 1526, he served as…
Pedagogical Encounters in Soledad Brother
George Jackson (1941–1971) was an African American prison-made revolutionary and a key intellectual in the Black Power Movement. At the age of eighteen, Jackson was sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence of one year to life inside California’s maximum-security prisons, where he was killed by a tower guard. His revolutionary knowledge exited the prison space through his letters and reached the wider public when published in 1970 as Soledad B…
“Time to die many times”
For young couples separated during the First World War, letters would become the primary means of maintaining their relationship. The narrative of time, both the subjective experience of time and the constant awareness of clock time, is strikingly visible throughout a range of correspondence and is central to how these writers negotiate their relationship through years of separation. This paper explores how the pain of separation was measured thr…
Love, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy
The Letters of Courtesans forms the fourth book of Alciphron’s epistolary collection (second or third century AD). Despite being written during the Imperial period, these love letters intriguingly transport their readers to fictional portrayals of life in prostitution from the Classical and Hellenistic eras. This study examines a double pedagogical perspective of the Letters of Courtesans, as both erotic and rhetorical discourses, focusing on the…
Intertextual Temporalities in Isabella Bird’s Letters from Japan
This paper explores the multilayered sense of time in Isabella Bird’s letters and their impact on contemporary epistolary works. Her travelogue, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), offers a perspective on Japan’s cultural and social evolution during the late nineteenth century. Her letters capture the intermingling of two different historical times in Japan: a traditional way of life that had existed for centuries and the newly introduced, Westerniz…
An Award Letter Too Late to Receive
In 1816, Sophie Germain became the first woman to win the Grand Prix de Mathématiques, awarded by the Class of Mathematics and Physics of the French Institute for her work on the theory of elastic surfaces. However, due to a failure in communication, she never received the formal invitation with her ceremony tickets and ultimately did not attend. Instead, she received a brief notice at the last moment, advising her that she was welcome to be pres…
“Many of us will find it’s a hard task
In June 1865, The Soldier’s Friend organized a penmanship contest open only to Union veterans whose combat injuries had required them to relearn penmanship with their left hands. This essay considers this corpus of handwriting exemplars for two purposes: the study of letter writing and disability identity and the pedagogical potential of those letters. This essay is interested in genre theory’s insight about what Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley …
Two Millennia of Epistolary Editing, or Cicero’s The Letters to Atticus as 426 Decisions
Marcus Tullius Cicero’s The Letters to Atticus remains among the earliest and least understood of surviving ancient epistolary collections. First attested in the public realm 100 years after Cicero’s death, the editor’s identity remains unknown, as well as this person’s aim in creating the collection. If these 426 letters represent a fraction of those Cicero wrote to his friend, on what basis they were chosen? Was it to provide background on the …
Model Letters Declining Arranged Marriages
This paper examines model letters declining arranged marriages exchanged between young people and their elders in Republican China. These new models deserve special attention for creating a subtle tension in the family hierarchy during the early twentieth century. Notwithstanding their common purpose, model letters declining arranged marriages produced by different publishers differ in format and tone. While certain model letters reinforced Confu…
“I wrote letters? To you?”
This paper explores a collection of letters that brought my mother and me together when physical distance separated us and, twenty years later, brought us some measure of togetherness in the face of dementia’s erosions. I worked as a volunteer teacher in post-war Uganda from 1986 to 1989, communicating with family and friends almost exclusively by handwritten letters. My mother promised to be my most faithful correspondent and she was. When my mo…
Transatlantic Letters and Settler Identities
This article reads one side of a transatlantic correspondence, that of Irish emigrant Jane White, who relocated to Canada in 1849, during a time of high migration from Ireland to Canada. The point of reading her one-sided correspondence is because it challenges scholars in both material and theoretical ways. Jane’s letters are a richly complicated source for such an undertaking, allowing readers to assess the impact of material circumstances and …
Writing Upwards
Robert Gordon Menzies received approximately 22,000 letters during his record-breaking second term of office as Australia’s Prime Minister (1949–66). This article examines the corpus as an example of “writing upwards,” a distinctive epistolary genre in which the weak wrote to the powerful, to praise them, berate them, abuse them, or perhaps wish them a happy birthday. From this perspective, the Menzies correspondence takes its place alongside the…
Printing Tibetan Epistolaria
In Tibetan tradition, letter writing is a sophisticated art in which the material aspects of a letter––paper format, script style and size, text spacing and layout––are integral to the letter's semantic content. What meaning is lost and gained in the transformation from manuscript original to printed edition? What scribal and editorial decisions are at play in this textual transformation? My aims in this article are twofold: to introduce scholars…
An Empire of Letters
Around 800 Roman tilia—writing tablets made from folded slivers of wood veneer and a little over postcard size—have been found in archaeological investigations at Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern England. Dated to the period 85 CE to 130 CE, their existence is helping revise knowledge of the Roman letter and the part it played in how military governance was organized, the ways in which personal, public, and military aspects were interrelated,…
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Writing Upwards
Robert Gordon Menzies received approximately 22,000 letters during his record-breaking second term of office as Australia’s Prime Minister (1949–66). This article examines the corpus as an example of “writing upwards,” a distinctive epistolary genre in which the weak wrote to the powerful, to praise them, berate them, abuse them, or perhaps wish them a happy birthday. From this perspective, the Menzies correspondence takes its place alongside the…
Printing Tibetan Epistolaria
In Tibetan tradition, letter writing is a sophisticated art in which the material aspects of a letter––paper format, script style and size, text spacing and layout––are integral to the letter's semantic content. What meaning is lost and gained in the transformation from manuscript original to printed edition? What scribal and editorial decisions are at play in this textual transformation? My aims in this article are twofold: to introduce scholars…
An Empire of Letters
Around 800 Roman tilia—writing tablets made from folded slivers of wood veneer and a little over postcard size—have been found in archaeological investigations at Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern England. Dated to the period 85 CE to 130 CE, their existence is helping revise knowledge of the Roman letter and the part it played in how military governance was organized, the ways in which personal, public, and military aspects were interrelated,…
Model Letters Declining Arranged Marriages
This paper examines model letters declining arranged marriages exchanged between young people and their elders in Republican China. These new models deserve special attention for creating a subtle tension in the family hierarchy during the early twentieth century. Notwithstanding their common purpose, model letters declining arranged marriages produced by different publishers differ in format and tone. While certain model letters reinforced Confu…
“I wrote letters? To you?”
This paper explores a collection of letters that brought my mother and me together when physical distance separated us and, twenty years later, brought us some measure of togetherness in the face of dementia’s erosions. I worked as a volunteer teacher in post-war Uganda from 1986 to 1989, communicating with family and friends almost exclusively by handwritten letters. My mother promised to be my most faithful correspondent and she was. When my mo…
Transatlantic Letters and Settler Identities
This article reads one side of a transatlantic correspondence, that of Irish emigrant Jane White, who relocated to Canada in 1849, during a time of high migration from Ireland to Canada. The point of reading her one-sided correspondence is because it challenges scholars in both material and theoretical ways. Jane’s letters are a richly complicated source for such an undertaking, allowing readers to assess the impact of material circumstances and …
“Rouse her to independence”
This paper explores the correspondences between the cult of motherhood and the conventions of maternal education in three series of fictional letters and Mary Hays’s early feminist novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799). In late eighteenth-century novels mothers are notably absent; their stories are mediated through letters and memoirs. Letters with advice and guidance from absent mothers or maternal surrogates to daughters were also a staple eleme…
Pen Pals and Pedagogy
Often considered a lost art, letter writing can be a useful instrument that allows college students to make connections with the subjects they study in the classroom. Although most social institutions have become digital and conduct the majority of their communications through paperless mechanisms, handwritten letters remain a primary mode of communication in correctional facilities (detention centers, jails, and prisons). This communication can …
Fighting against Time
Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) is one of the most important Florentine historians, thinkers, and statesmen of the Renaissance era. A friend of the more famous Niccolò Machiavelli, Guicciardini was very active during the period of the Italian Wars when the great European monarchies were fighting over Italian territory. Between the French defeat at Pavia on February 24, 1525, and the signing of the League of Cognac on May 22, 1526, he served as…
Pedagogical Encounters in Soledad Brother
George Jackson (1941–1971) was an African American prison-made revolutionary and a key intellectual in the Black Power Movement. At the age of eighteen, Jackson was sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence of one year to life inside California’s maximum-security prisons, where he was killed by a tower guard. His revolutionary knowledge exited the prison space through his letters and reached the wider public when published in 1970 as Soledad B…
“Time to die many times”
For young couples separated during the First World War, letters would become the primary means of maintaining their relationship. The narrative of time, both the subjective experience of time and the constant awareness of clock time, is strikingly visible throughout a range of correspondence and is central to how these writers negotiate their relationship through years of separation. This paper explores how the pain of separation was measured thr…
Love, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy
The Letters of Courtesans forms the fourth book of Alciphron’s epistolary collection (second or third century AD). Despite being written during the Imperial period, these love letters intriguingly transport their readers to fictional portrayals of life in prostitution from the Classical and Hellenistic eras. This study examines a double pedagogical perspective of the Letters of Courtesans, as both erotic and rhetorical discourses, focusing on the…
Intertextual Temporalities in Isabella Bird’s Letters from Japan
This paper explores the multilayered sense of time in Isabella Bird’s letters and their impact on contemporary epistolary works. Her travelogue, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), offers a perspective on Japan’s cultural and social evolution during the late nineteenth century. Her letters capture the intermingling of two different historical times in Japan: a traditional way of life that had existed for centuries and the newly introduced, Westerniz…
An Award Letter Too Late to Receive
In 1816, Sophie Germain became the first woman to win the Grand Prix de Mathématiques, awarded by the Class of Mathematics and Physics of the French Institute for her work on the theory of elastic surfaces. However, due to a failure in communication, she never received the formal invitation with her ceremony tickets and ultimately did not attend. Instead, she received a brief notice at the last moment, advising her that she was welcome to be pres…
“Many of us will find it’s a hard task
In June 1865, The Soldier’s Friend organized a penmanship contest open only to Union veterans whose combat injuries had required them to relearn penmanship with their left hands. This essay considers this corpus of handwriting exemplars for two purposes: the study of letter writing and disability identity and the pedagogical potential of those letters. This essay is interested in genre theory’s insight about what Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley …
Two Millennia of Epistolary Editing, or Cicero’s The Letters to Atticus as 426 Decisions
Marcus Tullius Cicero’s The Letters to Atticus remains among the earliest and least understood of surviving ancient epistolary collections. First attested in the public realm 100 years after Cicero’s death, the editor’s identity remains unknown, as well as this person’s aim in creating the collection. If these 426 letters represent a fraction of those Cicero wrote to his friend, on what basis they were chosen? Was it to provide background on the …