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Heloise and Discussion about Love. This chapter examines the significance of the early love affair of Abelard and Heloise. It argues that this relationship was not simply a matter of fornication portrayed by Abelard in the Historia calamitatum. Drawing on the Epistolae duorum amantium, which I argue is a record of an early exchange between Abelard and Heloise, I explain that Heloise wanted to apply Ciceronian ideals of friendship to love between a man and a woman. At her request, Abelard did endeavor to define friendship in terms based on Cicero, but he never developed her interest in true friendship as not seeking any personal reward. His love letters are more strongly influenced by a passionate ideal of love, inspired by the poetry of Ovid.

This chapter compares attitudes towards privacy among modern Chinese writers who published or withheld their love-letters from publication, in the context of modern Chinese history. The unstated theme throughout Letters between Two and the OC was Lu Xun and Xu Guangping's search for privacy. As a collection of love-letters published by its authors, Letters between Two was not unique. Its special quality lies in the extent and nature of its editing. As one of the very few letter collections where the original letters can be read alongside the published version, it also allowed readers a unique perspective on what Lu Xun regarded as most private in his life. The correspondence also provided an authentic glimpse into the changing face of social life in China: how one couple in the public eye coped with new thinking on love, sex, and marriage.

Hamlet is the most prolific letter-writer in William Shakespeare's drama. He writes a love letter to Ophelia. He writes to his uncle and stepfather king Claudius, advising him that he has returned to Denmark. He writes to his mother. He writes to his friend Horatio, with news and instructions on how to deliver other letters. He writes to the king of England, although not under his own name. Three of his letters are read out on stage in their entirety. Four, if not all, of these letters make a physical appearance on stage. Hamlet is thus filled with letters, its plot often dependent on them, and its hero its leading writer. As this chapter suggests, however, it is through the writing — or rather the rewriting — of one of Hamlet's letters that Shakespeare provides a different perspective on one of the play's central themes: how and what to remember.

In 1682, Lady Henrietta Berkeley eloped with her brother‐in‐law Ford, Lord Grey, one of Monmouth's closest personal friends and an avid follower in his rebellion. The scandal, much‐watched in the popular press and the subject of avid contemporary gossip, found its most memorable representation in Aphra Behn's Love‐Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7), arguably the first novel in English. Love‐Letters draws on the salacious details of the Berkeley–Grey affair, including details that emerged in the subsequent trial, and places the story of sexual perfidy and perversion squarely in the context of the Monmouth Rebellion. Against that backdrop, Love‐Letters delineates the complexities of late seventeenth‐century tory sensibility and attacks what Behn saw as the faithlessness and treason of exclusion‐era Whig ideology. Familiar seduction topoi and gender roles are satirically revised, while sexual encounters are shown consistently to complicate the categories of rape and seduction, undermining the regime of “force or fraud.”

The correspondence between Lu Xun (1881–1936), modern China's greatest writer, and Xu Guangping (1897–1968), his former student and his partner from 1927 to the end of his life, gives a unique insight into their private lives: how they felt about current events, about life in general, about themselves, and about each other. This book is about their intimate lives and their search for privacy as revealed in their published and unpublished letters. Part I relates the story of how Lu Xun and Xu Guangping became a couple. Part II begins with a general survey of letters, imagined letters, and love-letters in China and in the West. Part III examines the ‘personal space’ created by the deletions, recensions, retentions, and additions to Letters between Two in regard to its vocabulary, and relates it to the functions and values of privacy as defined in English-language studies.

The letters between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping from 1925 to 1929 shared many formal characteristics of love-letters by other couples and of letter-writing in general in the early twentieth century. Their frequency was due to the efficiency of the post office as well as to their own feelings; they were as careful or carefully slapdash respectively in the appearance of their letters as in their language use. They began by using the conventional forms of address, only to abandon them as their intimacy increased. From the very beginning of their correspondence, Xu Guangping and Lu Xun fell into the habit of writing to each other almost every day, and at length. They were formal with each other at first, and uncertainty introduced an uneasy facetiousness, which in turn became exuberance after they become lovers.

In the 1920s and 1930s China was swept by a “love-letter fever,” a craze for real and fictional romantic letters (qingshu). One of this trend’s most important representatives was the notoriously frivolous writer Zhang Yiping (1902-1946). This chapter places Zhang’s retranslation of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman of 1933 against the background of the young Chinese Republic’s ongoing struggles for modernity, when a multitude of theories on literature and its social functions were competing with each other. It also shows how Zhang used the prestige of a European writer in his feud with Lu Xun (1881-1936), one of China’s most influential writers. Taking the Chinese discourses as a starting point, a close reading of Letter from an Unknown Woman concludes the chapter. Beyond the framework of epistolary fiction and the love-letter genre the work reveals complex narrative strategies and literary dimensions which significantly complicate existing interpretations of Zweig’s most famous novella.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of the doctrine of “passive obedience and non‐resistance” in seventeenth‐century royalist and monarchist ideology, and shows how a crisis surrounding the doctrine emerged in the 1680s around the “Glorious Revolution.” This crisis shaped both the experiences of tory‐oriented subjects and the prose fiction they produced. An impasse was created for many subjects when they were required to swear allegiance to William and Mary or defy the de facto government at the cost of social viability. That impasse led to a proliferation of literature interrogating the meanings and limits of passive obedience, its connection to virtue (in both the political and the domestic spheres), and the possibility of options besides wholesale collusion or resistance. The chapter argues for the importance to this debate of Lettres Portugaises (1669), translated by Roger L'Estrange as Five Love‐Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier in 1678, and its influence on later seventeenth‐century and eighteenth‐century seduction writing.

This chapter considers how letters worked to move a relationship forward and facilitate greater emotional intimacy between writers. The chapter evaluates the role of the love letter on the path to matrimony using the correspondences of eight couples of varied social rank. Letter-writing is presented as a distinct stage of courtship, during which couples negotiated, tested, and cemented a marital bond. Men and women adopted particular gendered strategies, with women demonstrating their virtue, modesty, and self-doubt to suitors, who in return emphasized their sincerity, and—with increasing frequency over the century—rhapsodized about their depth of feeling. Engagement to marry was not a single moment but a lengthy process, becoming more assured as greater numbers of letters were exchanged. The chapter demonstrates the emotional value of missives as ‘thoughts’ or ‘favours’ sent by loved ones, which were treated as treasured possessions and praised as sources of pleasure that could even transcend death itself.

In 1977, an exchange of thirty-one letters between William and Mary Wordsworth, written in 1810, was discovered by a stamp dealer in Carlisle. Their subject is what Wordsworth describes as ‘the lively gushing thought employing spirit stirring passion of love’ between husband and wife. This chapter explores how the discovery of these letters has changed our understanding the domestic life of Wordsworth, a man described by Coleridge as ‘by nature incapable of love.’

The love affair between Pietro Cardinali and Raffaella Saraceni suspected by public opinion appears likely to have been real in the light of this chapter, which explores Cardinali’s relationships with women who had fallen in love with him in the circus arena. Moving beyond the restraint of earlier cultural-history approaches to private letters, the chapter is based upon more than forty passionate love letters written by women from various points in southern Italy, all of whom expressed the desire to marry Pietro. One particular correspondent revealed a great deal of her sentimental inner life as she pursued him assiduously over the course of many months. As a genre, secret love letters exemplify an emotional refuge, allowing escape from the strictures of the prevailing emotional regime. Building on such notions, the chapter argues that these women created their own virtual emotional arenas. The result was a set of imaginary spaces in which otherwise very constrained women took the role of prima donna, freely able to express love and desire. Their letters allow glimpses into the way cultural genres such as novels, the theatre, and opera, may have provided frameworks for these women’s emotional experiences, and their expression in arenas of their own imagining. The chapter draws on the work of literary and cultural scholars, bringing it into contact with the lived experience of ordinary southern Italian women as expressed in their own words. It provides an unusually personal exploration of rarely revealed aspects of Italian female emotional lives.

A night divided between Sonny Rollins and John Lewis sounds promising. Rollins and his quartet were to play for the first half of the program. Lewis was to premiere his score for a new Italian film, The Milano Story. For Rollins, the promise was fulfilled successfully. From his opening choruses on Three Little Words, it was obvious that he was going to play with authority and with a penetrating humour which included a self-parody. His masterwork of the evening was a cadenza on “Love Letters”, which had a kind of truly artistic feel that jazz has not heard since the Louis Armstrong of the early 1930s. Lewis' five-part piece was a disappointment. It seemed raw in its scoring, in development of its ideas, and in weird transitions from jazz to quasi-Italian schmaltz and back.

This chapter looks closely at the Astaires’ relationship, both professional and personal, with producer Charles Dillingham for whom they did three shows between 1919 and 1922. The first two shows were operettas, Apple Blossoms (1919) and The Love Letter (1921). The former had a score by Fritz Kreisler, while the latter witnessed the birth of the Astaires’ famous ‘run-around’, a novelty dance number which, two years later in London, would be renamed ‘The Oompah Trot’. Before their final Dillingham show, the Astaires appeared in the musical comedy For Goodness Sake, produced by a young man named Alex A. Aarons, whom Fred met in a men’s clothing store. This show had the distinction of having music provided by George Gershwin and lyrics by his brother Ira (then writing under the pseudonym Arthur Francis), although it was not a ‘Gershwin show’. The Astaires’ final collaboration with Dillingham was also their first starring vehicle, The Bunch and Judy. This was a flop, despite having a score by Jerome Kern, and the Astaires’ close relationship with Dillingham cooled. But Alex Aarons negotiated a contract for them to take For Goodness Sake to London in 1923, where they would become stars and make an extraordinary impact on theatre and society. Chapter 4 pays particular attention to Fred and Adele’s development as dancing comedians, and to the eccentricity and eloquence of their dancing style.

Kunihiko Hashimoto, a Japanese man who was young enough to be Leonard Bernstein’s son, met the maestro at the end of the New York Philharmonic’s Japan tour in the summer of 1979, and the two men spent the night together. Hashimoto immediately fell deeply in love and subsequently wrote many long, passionate letters to Bernstein that reveal the life-changing impact that the encounter with the maestro had for him. Hashimoto’s many letters eloquently demonstrate that his love for Bernstein was far more than romantic love and sexual attraction: it was admiration, awe, and worship for the man whom he clearly saw as truly great power.

This chapter discusses the train of events that took place in the years 1879–1882 as the parties in the John Wesley Hillmon case readied themselves for trial. It first considers the affidavit made by John Brown as well as the issue of hearsay evidence. In Lawrence, the agents of the insurance companies sued by Sarah Quinn Hillmon searched for a man whom they could claim to be the dead man found at Crooked Creek, and chanced upon Frederick Adolph Walters. Even Walters' family had come to believe that he was the man killed at Crooked Creek. The chapter also considers one importance piece of evidence, a love letter allegedly written by Walters to his fiancée, Alvina Kasten, and presents excerpts from her deposition in the case of Hillmon v. Mutual Life Insurance Company et al.. Finally, it looks at the original pleadings, orders, transcripts, and exhibits to the six trials of the Hillmon case that are kept at the National Archives and Records Administration in Kansas City.

This chapter examines two South African films, Forgiveness and Zulu Love Letter, suggesting that both find fault with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), particularly its emphasis on the forgiveness of torture. It considers the place of TRC in the process of considering the representation of torture in postapartheid South African cultural production, as well as in U.S. movies made after the era of protest/solidarity films such as Cry Freedom (1987), Cry the Beloved Country (1952, 1995), A Dry White Season (1989), and Sarafina (1992). It sees TRC as an obstacle to the process of remaking South African society after the devastation wrought by apartheid and by colonialism before it. The chapter criticizes Forgiveness but praises Zulu Love Letter for its engagement with the history of apartheid and the consequences of the antiapartheid struggle on familial and communal relationships, along with its depiction of traumatized individuals. It also analyzes representations of torture in postapartheid film by discussing J. M. Coetzee’s essay “Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State”.