Whites Writing Whiteness
Letters and Epistolarity – Introductory Reading List
Recommended key reading is indicated with ** against author names
A. Background Reading on Letters and Epistolarity
Janet Gurkin Altman (1982) Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. (Concerned with fictional letters and especially epistolary novels, but also discusses many interesting ideas and is theoretically very insightful.)
**David Barton & Nigel Hall (eds, 2000) Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin. (A very important collection. See almost all the chapters, and especially Barton & Hall, Bazerman, Austin, Hall, Kell and Yates. A ‘must read’.)
Caroline Bland and Maire Cross (2004) ‘Gender politics: Breathing new life into old letters’ in (eds) C. Bland and M. Cross Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-Writing, 1750-2000 Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, pp.3-14. (Useful eclectic collection organised around ways of seeing gender politics in letters, that is, letters as a means to effect politics, rather than just being seen as repositories of information about politics.)
Bruce Elliott, David Gerber and Suzanne Sinke (2006) ‘Introduction’ in (eds) Bruce Elliott, David Gerber and Suzanne Sinke Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.1-25. (Useful discussion, although it begs questions as to what precisely a ‘migrant letter’ is, and provides a rather odd reading of Thomas & Znaniecki. However, mixed in is a good deal of excellent stuff.)
**William Merrill Decker (1998) Epistolary Practices. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. (The whole book is interesting and thought-provoking and is essential reading.)
Rebecca Earle (ed, 1999) Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers 1600–1945. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. (A useful edited collection.)
Amanda Gilroy and W.M. Verhoeven (eds, 2000) Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. (A useful edited collection.)
James How (2003) Epistolary Spaces. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. (Some very interesting conceptual ideas here about epistolary space and its dynamics.)
Esther Milne (2010) Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence New York: Routledge. (Packed with interesting ideas, too many to summarise; important reading.)
Susan Whyman (2009) The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800 Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Looks in a systematic at a very wide range of ordinary letter-writers in family collections over the lengthy period of time it deals with; fascinating, and while some times the detail raises issues which are not dealt with, it remains key reading.)
B. Theorising Letters – From the Schreiner Letters Project
For downloadable versions of the articles and chapters referenced below, please see http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/TeamPublications.html
(i) Re/Reading and Epistolary Practices
** Helen Dampier (2008)‘Re-reading as a methodology: the case of Boer women’s testimonies,’ Qualitative Research 8, 3:367–77. (Helpful and accessible discussion of how re-reading can be done.)
Helen Dampier (2011) “Re-readings of Olive Schreiner’s letters to Karl Pearson: against closure” in ed, Stanley “Olive Schreiner and Company: Letters and ‘Drinking in the External World’” OSLP Working Papers on Letters, Letterness & Epistolary Networks No 3, University of Edinburgh, pp. 46-71 http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/OSandCompany2011PDF.pdf (Discussion of re-reading in relation to a particular set of letters.)
Andrea Salter (2011) “‘Dear Ones!’: Multiple addressees and epistolary relationships in a Findlay family letter” in ed, Stanley “Olive Schreiner and Company: Letters and ‘Drinking in the External World’” OSLP Working Papers on Letters, Letterness & Epistolary Networks No 3, University of Edinburgh, pp. 73-107 http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/OSandCompany2011PDF.pdf (Around one particular very long family letter, teases out the claims being made, readings encouraged, and positions marked out.)
Salter, Andrea (2013) “Stories, or ‘someone telling something to someone about something’: Stories in Olive Schreiner’s Letters and Nella Last’s Mass Observation Diary” in (ed) Liz Stanley Documents of Life Revisited Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishers, pp.93-105. (Uses ideas from Michel de Certeau to pin down what ‘a story’ is in Schreiner’s and other letters and the purposes to which epistolary story-telling is put.)
Liz Stanley and Helen Dampier (2006) ‘Simulacrum Diaries: Time, the “Moment of Writing” and the Diaries of Johanna Brandt-Van Warmelo’, Life Writing 3: 25-52. (Detailed focus on the construction and inscription of time and in particular the ‘moment of writing’, in this case regarding diaries but transferable to letter-writing.)
Liz Stanley & Helen Dampier (2008) “‘She wrote Peter Halket’: Fictive and factive devices in Olive Schreiner’s letters and Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland” in (eds) David Robinson et al Narratives and Fiction Huddersfield, UK: University of Huddersfield Press, pp. 61-71. (Examines some different but interrelated writing practices – the factive and the fictive – deployed in letters and novel-writing.)
Liz Stanley and Andrea Salter (2009) “‘Her Letters Cut Are Generally Nothing of Interest’: The Heterotopic Persona of Olive Schreiner and the Alterity-Persona of Cronwright-Schreiner.” English in Africa 36.2: 7–30. (Detailed examination, using a framework from Foucauldian thinking, of the hows and wherefores of the editorial practices used in producing a biography and a collection of highly bowdlerised versions of Schreiner’s letters.)
**Liz Stanley, Andrea Salter, and Helen Dampier (2013, in press) “The work of making and the work it does: Cultural sociology and ‘bringing-into-being’ the cultural assemblage of the Olive Schreiner letters” Cultural Sociology. (Explores and theorises practices impinging on epistolarity beyond the ‘moment’ of original writing/reading, importantly including editorial practices.)
Liz Stanley, Andrea Salter, and Helen Dampier (2013, in press) “Olive Schreiner, Epistolary Practices and Microhistories: A Cultural Entrepreneur in a Historical Landscape” Journal of Cultural & Social History. (A detailed discussion of the ideas and practices of Schreiner as a cultural entrepreneur, theorised in the context of the framework and ideas of microhistory.)
(ii) The Epistolarium, the Epistolary Gift & the Epistolary Pact
Dampier, Helen (2013) “Identifying the Quotidian in the Heterotopic Universe of Olive Schreiner’s Letters” in (ed) Liz Stanley Documents of Life Revisited Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishers, pp.149-60. (Traces development of thinking about what Schreiner’s and other letters ‘are’ and in particular the idea of the routine, everyday and quotidian.)
Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley (2005) “Letters As/Not a Genre.” Life Writing 2: 91–118. (Discussion and debate between the authors concerning whether, to what extent and in what ways letters form a distinct genre.)
**Stanley, Liz, Dampier, Helen and Salter, Andrea (2013, in press) “The epistolary pact, letterness and the Schreiner epistolarium” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 27: 262-3. (Draws on Lejeune and Altman, to develop ideas about and theorise the existence of an ‘epistolary pact’.)
Liz Stanley (2004) ‘The Epistolarium: On Theorising Letters and Correspondences’, Auto/Biography 12: 216-50. (Theorises the idea of the ‘epistolarium’ as a means of conceptualising collections of letters and letter-writing and the different dimensions or facets of the epistolarium.)
Liz Stanley (2010) ‘On Small and Big Stories of the Quotidian: The Commonplace and The Extraordinary in Narrative Inquiry’, in David Robinson et al (eds) Narratives, Memory and Ordinary Lives Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press, pp. 1-24. (Around a controversy in narrative inquiry concerning ‘small stories and ‘big stories’, this discussion of details of some letters refutes the binary and shows that the commonplace and the extraordinary, the small everyday and the large historic, events are intertwined.)
Liz Stanley (2011) “Olive Schreiner, ‘A Returned South African’, Her Letters, Her Essays, Her Fiction, Her Politics, Her Life: The Epistolarium Revisited” in (ed) Liz Stanley “Olive Schreiner & Company: Schreiner’s Letters and ‘Drinking In the External World’” Olive Schreiner Letters Project Working Paper on Letters, Letterness & Epistolary Networks No.3, University of Edinburgh, pp.19-44 http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/OSandCompany2011PDF.pdf (Builds on the key concept of the epistolarium, by reference to work by the Olive Schreiner Letters Project.)
**Liz Stanley (2011) ‘Letters, the Epistolary Gift, the Editorial Thirty-Party, Counter-Epistolaria: Rethinking the Epistolarium’, Life Writing 8: 135-52. (Substantially extends theorisation of the core concept of the epistolarium and relates it to ideas about the gift, third-parties and counter-epistolaria.)
(iii) Letters, Letterness and Performativity
Sarah Poustie (2010) Re-Theorising Letters and ‘Letterness’ OSLP Working Papers on Letters, Letterness & Epistolary Networks No. 1, University of Edinburgh http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/PoustieWPLetterness.pdf (Discusses the fluidity of the genre form of the letter, while recognising that some aspects remain fairly constant.)
Liz Stanley (2002) “‘Shadows Lying Across Her Pages’: Epistolary Aspects of Reading ‘The Eventful I’ in Olive Schreiner’s Letters 1889–1913.” Journal of European Studies 32: 251–66. (All writing ‘contains’ silences, the things left unwritten as well as the words on the page, and also characteristic ways of ‘saying without saying’, elliptical references which hint at what silences and hints cover. This is discussed in relation to ‘I’ as Schreiner’s impersonal distanced form of writing, while use of the impersonal ‘one’ covers highly personal references.)
Stanley, Liz and Dampier, Helen (2010) “‘Men selling their souls & the future – and fate watching them’: Olive Schreiner on Union” Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 64, 3: 121-36. (As a social commentator and theorist, Schreiner’s letters are often concerned with the dynamics of unfolding political and other events and her analysis of where these would take society in the future. Around the political union of the colonial settler states in 1910, her analysis also encompassed the moral fall of erstwhile white liberals, who supported union while knowing its likely retrograde consequences for black South Africans.)
**Liz Stanley and Dampier, Helen (2010) ‘“I trust that our brief acquaintance may ripen into sincere friendship”: Networks Across The Race Divide In South Africa In Conceptualising Olive Schreiner’s Letters 1890-1920’, OSLP Working Papers on Letters, Letterness & Epistolary Networks, No. 2, URL: http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/GiantRaceArticlePDF.pdf (Because Schreiner used her letters performatively to effect change regarding people she disagreed with, there are very few extant letters to members of the black intelligentsia she was friendly with. This discussion recovers aspects of these connections, around thinking about gaps as well as presences in letter-writing.)
**Stanley, Liz and Dampier, Helen (2012) “‘I just express my views & leave them to work’: Olive Schreiner as a feminist protagonist in a masculine political landscape with figures and letters” Gender and History 24: 677-700. (Discusses with detailed examples how and in what ways Schreiner’s letters were used performatively (in the Austin sense), to do the thing that the letter is ‘about’, and so achieve political changes of a range of kinds.)
Liz Stanley, Helen Dampier and Andrea Salter (2010) ‘Olive Schreiner Globalising Social Inquiry: A Feminist Analytics of Globalisation’, Sociological Review 58: 656-79. (Letters can be a way of engaging with social and political events at a meta-theoretical level. Looks at Schreiner’s epistolary analysis about imperialism and local forms of capitalism as an important precursor of present-day sociological ideas about globalisation.)
(iv) Related Letter Collections
Olive Schreiner Letters Online www.oliveschreiner.org – the complete extant 4800+ Olive Schreiner letters in a free, searchable and printable form with full editorial apparatus.
Olive Schreiner Letters Project www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk – website of the project that produced the Olive Schreiner Letters Online, complete with downloadable project publications, and also downloadable forms of Schreiner’s book-length publications.
John Barham (2007) Alice Greene, Teacher and Campaigner: South African Correspondence 1887-1902. London: Matador.
Yaffa Claire Draznin (ed.) (1992) My Other Self: The Letters of Olive Schreiner and Havelock Ellis 1884-1920. New York: Peter Lang.
Joan Findlay (1954) The Findlay Letters 1806-1870 Pretoria: Van Schaik.
Rykie van Reenen (ed, 1984) Emily Hobhouse Boer War Letters Cape Town: Human and Rousseau.
SOME USEFUL JOURNALS
J African Studies
J Commonwealth & Imperial History
J Southern African Studies
South African Historical Journal
South African Review of Sociology
Last updated: 20 December 2014
