Cultural Sociology 2015, Vol. 9(2) 240–255 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1749975515573267 cus.sagepub.com The Death of the Letter? Epistolary Intent, Letterness and the Many Ends of Letter- Writing Liz Stanley University of Edinburgh, UK Abstract Is the letter now ‘dead’, in terminal decline because of the impact of new digital technologies? Such arguments raise important points. However, they fail to distinguish between prevailing genre conventions for letter-writing in different time periods and the underlying ‘epistolary intent’ and ‘letterness’ involved, and so overstate the newness of the changes discussed. Examples of over- time departures from ‘the letter’ but which display clear epistolary intent and deploy inventive forms of letterness are discussed, including the letters of Olive Schreiner, St Paul’s epistles, communications between Roman legionaries, Second World War love letters, an exchange involving mathematicians, and student emails. Keywords communications, digital communications, email, epistolary, epistolary theory, genre theory, letters, letter writing, Olive Schreiner Introduction Recognising that cultural sociology is located at the crossroads of the wider discipline, Jacobs and Spillman’s (2005) overview of its then-future raised useful questions con- cerning whether and how its conceptual apparatus would develop from the then relative under-emphasis of transnational processes and over-emphasis of specialised cultural sys- tems. A decade on and the answer, abundantly evidenced, including by the existence of this journal, is that it has successfully done so (cf. Hall et al., 2012). But while there has been a decided upsurge of interest in popular cultural forms, there are some remaining lacunae regarding quotidian forms of cultural production. One such concerns letter-writing and its proxies. 1 This is perhaps surprising, for cognate areas of cultural anthropology Corresponding author: Liz Stanley, University of Edinburgh, George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, UK. Email: liz.stanley@ed.ac.uk 573267CUS 0 0 10.1177/1749975515573267Cultural SociologyStanley research-article 2015 Article