Edwina Preston pays tribute to the humble letter: from literary love letters to philosophical lessons to cherished family heirlooms. Letters impart lessons, reveal character – and are a form of art.
Articles on Letters
Displaying 21 - 40 of 49 articles
Australia Post is losing hundreds of millions of dollars on letters delivery. People just don’t need a daily postal service like they used to.
A photo beamed via a satellite from a smartphone is never the same as the description of a place the lover must try hard to imagine.
He was the poet who asked, ‘Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life?’ but new evidence suggests Larkin was proud of his library job.
Kate Grenville suggests we read Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters as ‘a wonderful piece of fiction, sustained over sixty years’. They were exercises in doubleness, concealment, and delicious irony.
The letter Z has become a controversial pro-Russian symbol during the war in Ukraine.
Two poems that were originally excised from ‘Ariel,’ Plath’s seminal poetry collection, vividly channel the painful experience of losing an unborn child.
As part of the nation’s massive wartime mobilization effort, millions of Americans, for the first time, traveled abroad – where many had their first encounters with the marine predators.
The written word has guided us through distance from our loved ones for centuries. Here’s how it can bring us closer
Doubt can be uncomfortable. It is often tempting to jump to conclusions. But Keats counsels otherwise.
Dickens worried for the safety of his sons when diphtheria broke out in France and - in a newly discovered letter - wrote about how the truth was difficult to find.
190 years after her birth, Dickinson’s life reminds us of how to confront the depths of loss with courage and hope.
While the man the world knows as ‘Papa’ balanced the demands of parenting with his work, his letters and fiction offer a window into the depth of his paternal feeling.
During our current bout of collective trauma, many of our coping strategies have mimicked the ways Americans responded to the Kennedy assassination.
Will there ever be an electronic equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ or Émile Zola’s ‘J’Accuse!’?
Developing fluency in handwriting matters for literacy outcomes, and handwriting is an elegant testimony to the unique power of the human voice.
The media trope negates the work done by archivists, who are often well-aware of the existence of ‘long-lost’ letters, journals and stories.
Leonard Cohen’s letter to his former girlfriend on her death bed became a viral phenomenon. But the words that circulated on social media were a paraphrased version, not his own.
Stacks of treasured love letters can tell the intimate stories of war.
In order to avoid being labeled a communist sympathizer, King needed to publicly distance himself from the controversial poet. Privately, King found ways to channel Hughes’ prose.
Top contributors
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Associate Editor, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway and Associate Research Professor of English, Penn State
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Assistant Lecturer, North Carolina State University
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Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University
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Strategy & International Business Group, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
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Adjunct Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management, Curtin University
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Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Director, Digital Culture and Media Initiative, Penn State
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Senior Lecturer and Senior Digital Learning Developer, UCL
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Lecturer in English, University of Exeter
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Senior Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW
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Deputy CEO, Regional Australia Institute
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Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, The Open University
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Lecturer in French Studies, The University of Melbourne
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Regents' Professor Emeritus of English, Georgia State University
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Professor in School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol
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Curator of Scientific Collections, University of Cambridge