Reading Practices, Writing Practices: love letters and intimate writings - France and Australia, 19th century

Abstract

This paper draws on recent French work on the intimate writing in the 19th century. It looks at letters as cultural artefacts and personal writings as highly coded forms, obeying generally accepted conventions. The situations, conditions and networks of sociability for their survival, the rules andshared rituals that determine their form constitute the social grammar of private writing, through which we can better understand cultural exchanges of the past.