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Abstract
"Material Letters: Media Histories of Epistolary Communication, 1766-1867" argues that the material processes of crafting and transmitting letters critically shaped eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates over race and aesthetics, Indigenous culture, history writing, and partisan journalism, as well as epistolary practice more generally. The project tracks the make and movement of letters composed by former slaves, Native Americans, politicians, elite women, and newspaper editors across a range of media. While recognizing that generic conventions, manuscripts, and postal systems are powerful interpretive horizons, the dissertation also considers allied forms of mediation whose interrelation has been overlooked by previous scholars of epistolarity. Bound codices, print ephemera, court trials, stage performances, oral storytelling, creative literature, natural histories, archival collections, and non-postal infrastructure are just as crucial to the ways in which letters thicken with meaning and acquire political salience. Individual chapters address the collected letters of an Anglo-African, Ignatius Sancho, intercultural epistolary practices involving a Cayuga-Mingo Native known as Logan, the letter correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams, and the epistolary and journalistic practices of editors Mordecai Noah and Alden Spooner. By integrating literary studies with book studies and communications, "Material Letters" develops a new, media-historical approach to epistolary writing. The work illuminates how communicative practices and technologies speak in chorus with letters' verbal contents and aesthetic features, and it accounts for how diverse media shape the interpretation and use of letters over time. Through unpacking the dense compressions of media and time that occur over letters' social and material lives, the dissertation historicizes the ways that elite and subjected people employ epistolary practices, and it ultimately rethinks the study of genre as the study of how people use media to vie for social power.
