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When Mr. Postman is unable to deliver the mail on Friendship Day, the pups volunteer to help spread the love.

The nationalization of the postal service in Italy transformed post-unification letter writing as a cultural medium. Both a harbinger of progress and an expanded, more efficient means of circulating information, the national postal service served as a bridge between the private world of personal communication and the public arena of information exchange and production of public opinion.  As a growing number of people read and wrote letters, they became part of a larger community that regarded the letter not only as an important channel in the process of information exchange, but also as a necessary instrument in the education and modernization of the nation. In Postal Culture , Gabriella Romani examines the role of the letter in Italian literature, cultural production, communication, and politics. She argues that the reading and writing of letters, along with epistolary fiction, epistolary manuals, and correspondence published in newspapers, fostered a sense of community and national identity and thus became a force for social change.

Four snails cross the country to deliver a special letter from a girl to the boy she loves.

This dissertation is about letters, literature, and gender in modern Japanese literature from 1900 to 1916. Across three chapters, I examine the development of a Japanese discourse on letters in the early 20thcentury—what I term Japan's epistolary discourse—and I argue that writers working in the wake of this discourse responded to it in and through their literary fictions. Whether by penning epistolary novels or embedding letters directly within their literary works, fiction writers consciously and conspicuously adopted, adapted, interrogated, contested, and rewrote this discourse to varying effect. Significantly, throughout these two interrelated and intertwined domains of discourse and fiction, letters are marshalled forth to negotiate rapidly shifting conceptions of gender during the Meiji (1868-1912) and early Taisho (1912-1928) eras. If, in both Japanese and Western contexts, letters are customarily considered the domain of women, and thus linked to privacy, interiority, and sentimentality, this dissertation argues that other fictions of the Japanese letter are and were available.Chapter One, “The Discourse on Letters,” examines the birth and efflorescence of Japan’s epistolary discourse across three sections. I first examine articles that construct the letter as a direct conduit to its writer’s interiority, arguing that in contrast to existing scholarship, writers only infrequently considered genbun’itchi—that supposed merging of written and spoken language—as the only or best linguistic style for expressing that interiority. Next, I examine articles that sought to uncover a history of Japanese letters, suggesting that this discovery stemmed from Japan’s desire to achieve cultural parity with its Western counterparts. I also show how this history is gendered, with men posited as the subject of this history and women as its object. In the final section, I construct what might be termed a phenomenology of the post. Rather than the letters themselves, this section is attendant to sensations engendered by the larger postal system, including those of speed, simultaneity, and contingency. While admittedly diffuse in focus, I would argue that, however minimally, we might view gender as a larger undercurrent structuring this chapter. As I noted above, these articles are written almost exclusively by men, and their thematic choices can be read as conversing with, if not bolstering, discourses alsoconstructed by (and perhaps for) men, including those on literary interiority and civilization and enlightenment.My second chapter, “Letters and the I-novel” examines the letters in three canonical I-novels: 田山花袋 Tayama Katai’s Futon 蒲団 (1907), Morita Sōhei’s 森田草 平(1881 -1949) Baien 煤煙 (Black Smoke; 1909-1910) and Chikamatsu Shūkō’s 近松秋 江 (1876-1944) Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami 別れたる妻に送る手紙 (Letter to the Wife Who Left Me;1910). Contrary to existing scholarship that has posited the tight imbrication of Naturalist literature and the letter, I argue that both within I-novel discourse and the texts of I-novels themselves, letters are conspicuously distinguished from the I-novel. Importantly, this differentiation also effects a conspicuous gendering of both the I-novel and the letters embedded there: while I-novel discourse is surfeit with the hallmarks of masculine logic, letters, by contrast, suffer the stereotypes of the feminine at every turn. My readings of the letters in the above I-novels overtly challenge this view, but it does so in a manner that attempts to avoid simply subverting existing scholarship and revealing the “concealed” masculinity of letters.

Jo fears what lives in the ocean but when her father is too ill to deliver messages in bottles, she courageously takes on the job, making new friends along the way.

[...]the aspect of Hardy's postal imagination that appears to be most persistently overlooked, by myself as well as other readers of Hardy's works, is Hardy's consciousness of, and engagement with, postal labour: the labour of local postmasters and postmistresses, of mail coach drivers, and of letter carriers. [...]it explores the tensions and resonances between Thomas Hardy's postal imagination and the Post Office's self-representation. [...]Raye doesn't expect much from Anna's letters, nor is he interested in their content. [...]she sets in motion a complex web of illusions.

Eleven-year-old Suzy Smith and the crew of the Impossible Postal Express must race through the Uncanny Valley and the Cloud Forge to save the Union--and Trollville--from a new threat.

InPostal Culture, Gabriella Romani examines the role of the letter in Italian literature, cultural production, communication, and politics.

Postmaster General Moist von Lipwig, who runs the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, and although he is a former arch-swindler and confidence man, has exceeded all expectations. So it's somewhat disconcerting when Lord Vetinari summons Moist to the palace and asks if he would like to make some real money, he's referring, rather, to the Royal Mint of Ankh-Morpork--a new opportunity or is it?

How do German realist writers re-imagine the epistolary event in the modern era of postal revolutions, characterized by standardized transmission interfaces? Looking more closely at Storm's and Raabe's narratives, in light of the conceptual shift between the 'human' and the 'technological' in the field of communication, this article argues that the birth of the Reichpost, alongside new practices and categories of mail (the pre-stamped letter, the postcard, the telegraph) had become associated with the threat of violence and death. But by that token, they also engendered epistolary nostalgia, a no less troubling sentiment that pervaded late nineteenth-century cultural production. Reprinted by permission of the German Studies Review