William Merrill Decker's Books

Epistolary Practices

Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications

By: William Merrill Decker

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Epistolary Practices

Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications

By: William Merrill Decker

Letters have long been read as primary sources for biography and history, but their performative, fictive, and textual dimensions have only recently attracted serious notice. In this book, William Merrill Decker examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the postmodern period. After offering an overview of the genre, Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of space, settlement, separation, and reunion. He discusses letters written by such well-known and well-educated persons as John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, and Alice James, but also letters by persons who, except in their correspondence, were not writers at all: indentured servants, New England factory workers, slaves, soldiers, and Western pioneers. Individual chapters explore the letter writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Adams--three of America's most ambitious, accomplished, and theoretically astute letter writers. Finally, Decker considers the ongoing transformation of letter writing in the electronic age.

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Page Count

308

Publisher

Univ of North Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807866636

ISBN 13

9780807866634

Geographies of Flight

Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler

By: William Merrill Decker

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Geographies of Flight

Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler

By: William Merrill Decker

African American writing commonly represents New World topography as a set of entrapments, contesting the open horizons, westward expansion, and individual freedom characteristic of the white, Eurocentric literary tradition. Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler provides the first comprehensive treatment of the ways in which African American authors across three centuries have confronted the predicament of inhabiting space under conditions of bondage and structural oppression. William Merrill Decker examines how, in testifying to those conditions, fourteen black authors have sought to transform a national cartography that, well into the twenty-first century, reflects white supremacist assumptions. These writers question the spatial dimensions of a mythic American liberty and develop countergeographies in which descendants of the African diaspora lay claim to the America they have materially and culturally created. Tracking the testimonial voice in a range of literary genres, Geographies of Flight explores themes of placement and mobility in the work of Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler.

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Page Count

421

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810142341

ISBN 13

9780810142343

Kodak Elegy

A Cold War Childhood

By: William Merrill Decker

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Kodak Elegy

A Cold War Childhood

By: William Merrill Decker

An compelling coming-of-age memoir that presents a portrait of suburban life in upstate New York shaped by the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam and the constant threat of Nuclear exchange during the 1950's/early 1960's.

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Page Count

275

Publisher

Syracuse University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0815651686

ISBN 13

9780815651680

Epistolary Practices

Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications

By: William Merrill Decker

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Epistolary Practices

Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications

By: William Merrill Decker

Letters have long been read as primary sources for biography and history, but their performative, fictive, and textual dimensions have only recently attracted serious notice. In this book, William Merrill Decker examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the postmodern period. After offering an overview of the genre, Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of space, settlement, separation, and reunion. He discusses letters written by such well-known and well-educated persons as John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, and Alice James, but also letters by persons who, except in their correspondence, were not writers at all: indentured servants, New England factory workers, slaves, soldiers, and Western pioneers. Individual chapters explore the letter writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Adams_three of America's most ambitious, accomplished, and theoretically astute letter writers. Finally, Decker considers the ongoing transformation of letter writing in the electronic age.

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Age

Page Count

308

Publisher

Univ of North Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807847437

ISBN 13

9780807847435

Kodak Elegy

A Cold War Childhood

By: William Merrill Decker

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Kodak Elegy

A Cold War Childhood

By: William Merrill Decker

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N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

275

Publisher

Syracuse University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0815651686

ISBN 13

9780815651680

Book's by William Merrill Decker

Epistolary Practices

Epistolary Practices

Geographies of Flight

Geographies of Flight

Kodak Elegy

Kodak Elegy

Epistolary Practices

Epistolary Practices

Kodak Elegy

Kodak Elegy

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