Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras. Transatlantic studies, authorship, reform movements, and the politics and practices of editing letters are treated in this exemplary collection that offers scholars a template of new approaches for exploring an understudied yet critically important genre.

Theresa Strouth Gaul is Associate Professor of English at Texas Christian University, USA and Sharon M. Harris is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA.

Introduction; I: Letters and Transnationalism; 1: "A continual and almost exclusive correspondence": Philip Mazzei's Transatlantic Citizenship; 2: Letters on the Use of Letters in Narratives: Catharine Macaulay, Susannah Rowson, and the Warren-Adams Correspondence; 3: Anticipating Colonialism: U.S. Letters on Puerto Rico and Cuba, 1831-1835; II: Letters and Authorship; 4: The Authentic Fictional Letters of Charles Brockden Brown; 5: Keys to "the labyrinth of my own being": Margaret Fuller's Epistolary Invention of the Self; 6: "Two single married women": The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stoddard and Margaret Sweat, 1851-1854; III: Letters and Periodicals; 7: Cherokee Catharine Brown's Epistolary Performances; 8: "Does such a being exist?": Olive Branch Readers Respond to Fanny Fern; 9: Dr. Mary Walker and the Economies of Letter Writing; 10: A Less Costly Ink: John Brown's Prison Letters and the Traditions of American Protest Literature; IV: Letters and Twenty-First Century Editions; 11: Authorship, Network, Textuality: Editing Mercy Otis Warren's Letters; 12: The Request of a Line: On Editing Harriet Jacobs's "Life Among the Contrabands"; 13: Edited Letter Collections as Epistolary Fictions: Imagining African American Women's History in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends