Letters and Literature 1500-2025: Histories, Forms, Communities

Our 3-day programme of presentations, creative readings and interviews, ‘Letters and Literature 1500-2025: Histories, forms, communities’, features researchers and writers from the fields of literature and language, heritage industry experts and, on Friday evening, guest authors Karen McCarthy Woolf and Sigrid Nunez.

Colleagues from across the Arts & Humanities at the Open University will join an international cast of academics, writers, publishers, museum representatives and archivists. OU speakers include:

23 postgraduate researchers are on the programme, including 10 Open University PhD students.

This free 3-day online international conference’s broad focus is the letter in its material and textual forms, as manifested across literary history­—from the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the golden age of epistolary fiction, Kate Thomas’ ‘postal plots’ of the nineteenth century, and what Maria Löschnigg and Rebekka Schuh have identified as an Epistolary Renaissance in the work of 21^st century writers. Participants will be engaging with this theme via a number of key questions, including:

• What strategies of narrative, plot, or character do letters illustrate and deploy?
• What is the relationship between letters and literary reputations?
• What counts as a letter in twenty-first century narratives?
• What is the role of materiality in literary letters?
• How do we recover, preserve and access letters in the archives?
• What elements of postal culture prove most helpful to understanding letters and literature?

Letters have been described as the ‘epistolary form of gift exchange’ (Stanley), and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan cites the ‘breathlessness of urgent listening’ evoked by writers’ correspondence. Further contributions investigate letters as makers and markers of creative communities, including the role of letters in writers’ networks and epistolary inspiration.

More than 100 speakers from 15 countries are joining together to make this what promises to be an excellent themed event on writers from Shakespeare to Austen, the Brontës and beyond, on the digital, museum and archive life of literary letters, and on how letters inspire creative acts and making. 

All information needed to choose and register for panel sessions is on our website. As are the wonderful postcards speakers have been sending to us ahead of the event.