Letter to the Americans

Letter to the Americans PDF Author: Jean Cocteau
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811231607
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
Like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, Jean Cocteau offers a powerful reminder to Americans of their own potential—and issues In 1949, Jean Cocteau spent twenty days in New York, and began composing on the plane ride home this essay filled with the vivid impressions of his trip. With his unmistakable prose and graceful wit, he compares and contrasts French and American culture: the different values they place on art, literature, liberty, psychology, and dreams. Cocteau sees the incredibly buoyant hopes in America’s promise, while at the same time warning of the many ills that the nation will have to confront—its hypocrisy, sexism, racism, and hegemonic aspirations—in order to realize this potential. Never before translated into English, Letter to the Americans remains as timely and urgent as when it was first published in France over seventy years ago.

Letter to the Americans

Letter to the Americans PDF Author: Jean Cocteau
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811231607
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
Like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, Jean Cocteau offers a powerful reminder to Americans of their own potential—and issues In 1949, Jean Cocteau spent twenty days in New York, and began composing on the plane ride home this essay filled with the vivid impressions of his trip. With his unmistakable prose and graceful wit, he compares and contrasts French and American culture: the different values they place on art, literature, liberty, psychology, and dreams. Cocteau sees the incredibly buoyant hopes in America’s promise, while at the same time warning of the many ills that the nation will have to confront—its hypocrisy, sexism, racism, and hegemonic aspirations—in order to realize this potential. Never before translated into English, Letter to the Americans remains as timely and urgent as when it was first published in France over seventy years ago.

In My Power

In My Power PDF Author: Konstantin Dierks
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
In My Power tells the story of letter writing and communications in the creation of the British Empire and the formation of the United States. In an era of bewildering geographical mobility, economic metamorphosis, and political upheaval, the proliferation of letter writing and the development of a communications infrastructure enabled middle-class Britons and Americans to rise to advantage in the British Atlantic world. Everyday letter writing demonstrated that the blessings of success in the early modern world could come less from the control of overt political power than from the cultivation of social skills that assured the middle class of their technical credentials, moral deserving, and social innocence. In writing letters, the middle class not only took effective action in a turbulent world but also defined what they believed themselves to be able to do in that world. Because this ideology of agency was extended to women and the youngest of children in the eighteenth century, it could be presented as universalized even as it was withheld from Native Americans and enslaved blacks. Whatever the explicit purposes behind letter writing may have been—educational improvement, family connection, business enterprise—the effect was to render the full terms of social division invisible both to those who accumulated power and to those who did not. The uncontested power that came from letter writing was, Konstantin Dierks provocatively argues, as important as racist violence to the rise of the white middle class in the British Atlantic world.

American Letter Writing ...

American Letter Writing ... PDF Author: Ethel Shubert
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Letter writing
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description


The New American Handbook of Letter Writing and Other Forms of Correspondence

The New American Handbook of Letter Writing and Other Forms of Correspondence PDF Author: Mary Ann De Vries
Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
ISBN: 9780517089187
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Includes "275 model messages for every possible need" as well as "sample formats for letters, envelopes, memos, cards, and more."

Letters to an American Lady

Letters to an American Lady PDF Author: C. S. Lewis
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802871828
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
When Lewis was 51 years old and long established at Magdalen College, Oxford, he wrote the first of this collection of letters to an American widow. She was described as a "very charming, gracious, southern aristocratic lady who loved to talk and speak well". In them are his antipathy to journalism, advertising, snobbery, psychoanalysis, and the petty practices that sap freedoms. They identify events in his life after 1950 including his marriage to Joy Davidman and her death three years later.

The Fashionable American Letter Writer

The Fashionable American Letter Writer PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description


Epistolary Practices

Epistolary Practices PDF Author: William Merrill Decker
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807866636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Letters have long been read as primary sources for biography and history, but their performative, fictive, and textual dimensions have only recently attracted serious notice. In this book, William Merrill Decker examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the postmodern period. After offering an overview of the genre, Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of space, settlement, separation, and reunion. He discusses letters written by such well-known and well-educated persons as John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, and Alice James, but also letters by persons who, except in their correspondence, were not writers at all: indentured servants, New England factory workers, slaves, soldiers, and Western pioneers. Individual chapters explore the letter writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Adams--three of America's most ambitious, accomplished, and theoretically astute letter writers. Finally, Decker considers the ongoing transformation of letter writing in the electronic age.

Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing

Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing PDF Author: Celeste-Marie Bernier
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748692940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 752

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Book Description
This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.

The Fashionable American Letter Writer, Or, The Art of Polite Correspondence

The Fashionable American Letter Writer, Or, The Art of Polite Correspondence PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Letter writing
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description


Letter Writing as a Social Practice

Letter Writing as a Social Practice PDF Author: David Barton
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027298661
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This book explores the social significance of letter writing. Letter writing is one of the most pervasive literate activities in human societies, crossing formal and informal contexts. Letters are a common text type, appearing in a wide variety of forms in most domains of life. More broadly, the importance of letter writing can be seen in that the phenomenon has been widespread historically, being one of earliest forms of writing, and a wide range of contemporary genres have their roots in letters. The writing of a letter is embedded in a particular social situation, and like all other types of literacy objects and events, the activity gains its meaning and significance from being situated in cultural beliefs, values, and practices. This book brings together anthropologists, historians, educators and other social scientists, providing a range of case studies that explore aspects of the socially situated nature of letter writing.