Private correspondences represent a body of texts which includes writers and readers, social networks and social
needs at a time. This applies both to the present and to the past. Women were great letter writers. Therefore,
Women`s History has taken an early interest in private letters, which Gender History never did to the same degree.
New approaches, such as cultural history, give special emphasis to textual meanings and aspects of communication,
as well as to the tensions between experience and discourse, norms and practices of private writings.
The book here presented has developed from this background of disparate research on the history of private
correspondences. Its aim is to contribute to a more detailed reflection on the genre, without favouring a single
approach. Therefore, the book comprises 14 chapters, all of them giving exemplary insights into the questions, the
topics and the methodological problems of the history of private letter-writing from the 16th to the end of the 20th
century. One result of it is the criticism of the common equation of private letters with female authorship, another
one underlines the fact that the genre did not loose its importance around 1900, as it has often been stated. The
concept of the book takes the reader to a new field of discussion located among different disciplines, including
History, German and Romance Literature, American Studies and Cultural Studies, which mostly have reflected on
letters only separately. The authors of the book are Anglo-Americans, French, Germans, Austrians and Swiss. They
represent a broad range of scientific cultures and disciplines. This approach towards the research on the history of
private correspondences is novel to the German-speaking countries, where such co-operations have not yet been
established. Stimulating interdisciplinary were one of the editors` aims. In their introduction, they also argue for a
history of private correspondences beyond gender dichotomies.