Trev Lynn Broughton takes an in-depth look at the developments within Victorian auto/biography, and asks what we can learn about the conditions and limits of male literary authority. Providing a feminist analysis of the effects of this literary production on culture, Broughton looks at the increase in professions with a vested interest in the written Life; the speeding up of the Life-and-Letters industry during this period; the institutionalization of Life-writing; and the consequent spread of a network of mainly male practitioners and commentators. This study focuses on two case studies from the period 1880-1903: the theories and achievements of Sir Leslie Stephen and the debate surrounding James Anthony Froude's account of the marriage of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle.

The New York Times bestselling author of Writing My Wrongs invites men everywhere on a journey of honesty and healing through this book of moving letters to his sons—one whom he is raising and the other whose childhood took place during Senghor's nineteen-year incarceration. “A visceral and visual journey for the ages . . . the perfect road map for us to remove the barriers and obstacles against our true feelings.”—Kenya Barris, creator of black-ish ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Essence Shaka Senghor has lived the life of two fathers. With his first son, Jay, born shortly after Senghor was incarcerated for second-degree murder, he experienced the regret of his own mistakes and the disconnection caused by a society that sees Black lives as disposable. With his second, Sekou, born after Senghor's release, he has experienced healing, transformation, intimacy, and the possibilities of a world where men and boys can openly show one another affection, support, and love. In this collection of beautifully written letters to Jay and Sekou, Senghor traces his journey as a Black man in America and unpacks the toxic and misguided messages about masculinity, mental health, love, and success that boys learn from an early age. He issues a passionate call to all fathers and sons—fathers who don't know how to show their sons love, sons who are navigating a fatherless world, boys who have been forced to grow up before their time—to cultivate positive relationships with other men, seek healing, tend to mental health, grow from pain, and rewrite the story that has been told about them. Letters to the Sons of Society is a soulful examination of the bond between father and sons, and a touchstone for anyone seeking a kinder, more just world.

Writing lays bare the soul. All serious writers know that each word reveals something significant about themselves, granting outsiders a glimpse at their most cherished beliefs and foundational convictions. In this series of intimate reflections on life and writing, critically acclaimed and best-selling novelist Bret Lott explores the author's craft through five letters covering a range of fascinating topics, from exploring the value of literary fiction to discussing the humility of Flannery O'Connor. In the final and longest letter, Lott contemplates the death of his father and his struggle to convey his complicated thoughts and inexplicable emotions in words. Intensely personal and yet universally relatable, this powerful collection of essays will encourage and enrich writers and aspiring writers everywhere.

This is the first full-length study of literary tourism in North America as well as Britain, and a unique exploration of popular response to writers, literary house museums, and the landscapes or "countries " associated with their lives and works. An interdisciplinary study ranging from 1820-1940, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries unites museum and tourism studies, book history, narrative theory, theories of gender, space, and things, and other approaches to depict and interpret the haunting experiences of exhibited houses and the curious history of topo-biographical writing about famous authors. In illustrated chapters that blend Victorian and recent first-person encounters that range from literary shrines and plaques to guidebooks, memoirs, portraits, and monuments, Alison Booth discusses pilgrims such as William and Mary Howitt, Anna Maria and Samuel Hall, and Elbert Hubbard, and magnetic hosts and guests as Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Martineau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, James, and Dickens. Virginia Woolf's feminist response to homes and haunts shapes a chapter on Mary Russell Mitford, Gaskell, and the Brontës, and another on the Carlyles' house and Monk's House. Booth rediscovers collections of personalities, haunted shrines, and imaginative re-enactments that have been submerged by a century of academic literary criticism.

The nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented expansion in the reading public and an explosive growth in the number of books and newspapers produced to meet its demands. These specially commissioned essays examine not only the full range and variety of texts that entertained and informed the Victorians, but also the boundaries of Victorian literature: the links and overlap with Romanticism in the 1830s, and the roots of modernism in the years leading up to the First World War. The Companion demonstrates how science, medicine and theology influenced creative writing and emphasizes the importance of the visual in painting, book illustration and in technological innovations from the kaleidoscope to the cinema. Essays also chart the complex and fruitful interchanges with writers in America, Europe and the Empire, highlighting the geographical expansion of literature in English. This Companion brings together the most important aspects of this prolific and popular period of English literature.

William Sharp (1855-1905) conducted one of the most audacious literary deceptions of his or any time. Sharp was a Scottish poet, novelist, biographer and editor who in 1893 began to write critically and commercially successful books under the name Fiona Macleod. This was far more than just a pseudonym: he corresponded as Macleod, enlisting his sister to provide the handwriting and address, and for more than a decade "Fiona Macleod" duped not only the general public but such literary luminaries as William Butler Yeats and, in America, E. C. Stedman. Sharp wrote "I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out". This three-volume collection brings together Sharp’s own correspondence – a fascinating trove in its own right, by a Victorian man of letters who was on intimate terms with writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, and George Meredith – and the Fiona Macleod letters, which bring to life Sharp’s intriguing "second self". With an introduction and detailed notes by William F. Halloran, this richly rewarding collection offers a wonderful insight into the literary landscape of the time, while also investigating a strange and underappreciated phenomenon of late-nineteenth-century English literature. It is essential for scholars of the period, and it is an illuminating read for anyone interested in authorship and identity.

A diary entry, begun by a wife and finished by a husband; a map of London, its streets bearing the names of forgotten lives; biographies of siblings, and of spouses; a poem which gives life to long-dead voices from the archives. All these feature in this volume as examples of ‘writing lives together’: British life writing which has been collaboratively authored and/or joins together the lives of multiple subjects. The contributions to this book range over published and unpublished material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. The book closes with essays by contemporary, practising biographers, Daisy Hay and Laurel Brake, who explain their decisions to move away from the single subject in writing the lives of figures from the Romantic and Victorian periods. We conclude with the reflections and work of a contemporary poet, Kathleen Bell, writing on James Watt (1736–1819) and his family, in a ghostly collaboration with the archives. Taken as a whole, the collection offers distinctive new readings of collaboration in theory and practice, reflecting on the many ways in which lives might be written together: across gender boundaries, across time, across genre. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Stories of the lives and losses of the Post Office Rifles in World War I--men who came from all ranks and walks of life, brought together by their common pre-war employment as Post Office workers When World War I broke out, the post office was the biggest employer in the world. Spanning many ranks and walks of life, 12,000 men fought bravely with the Post Office Rifles. By the war's end, 1,800 of them had been killed. Those same men who not long before had been sorting and delivering mail, found themselves hoping their own letters would get through to their loved ones at home, and relying on the letters and parcels sent to them for their own much needed morale-boosts. Using the personal stories and letters of the men who joined the Post Office Rifles, this is a moving account of how the war touched the lives of ordinary men--how it changed communities, how women took up men's working roles, and, of course, the vital role the mail played in the war. Love letters, letters from the front line, much-welcomed parcels of food and cigarettes, and sad letters of condolence--together these tell the story of the fallen heroes.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Huffington Post • Kansas City Star • Time Out New York • Kirkus Reviews This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction. Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide. Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from Vonnegut’s years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail Godwin, Günter Grass, and Bernard Malamud. Vonnegut’s unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels—from a crackpot scheme for manufacturing “atomic” bow ties to a tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade authors like baseball players. (“Knopf, for example, might give John Updike’s contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan Didion’s contract in return.”) Taken together, these letters add considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a-kind literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter brims with the mordant humor and openhearted humanism upon which he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut lexicon. • On a job he had as a young man: “Hell is running an elevator throughout eternity in a building with only six floors.” • To a relative who calls him a “great literary figure”: “I am an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop.” • To his daughter Nanny: “Most letters from a parent contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice.” • To Norman Mailer: “I am cuter than you are.” Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote. Praise for Kurt Vonnegut: Letters “Splendidly assembled . . . familiar, funny, cranky . . . chronicling [Vonnegut’s] life in real time.”—Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review “[This collection is] by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane. . . . Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over his entire life.”—NPR “Congenial, whimsical and often insightful missives . . . one of [Vonnegut’s] very best.”—Newsday “These letters display all the hallmarks of Vonnegut’s fiction—smart, hilarious and heartbreaking.”—The New York Times Book Review