Epistolarity: life after death of the letter?

Exploring what is at stake in the common lament that letter writing is dead, we cautiously celebrate a new age of ‘e-epistolarity’. In doing so, we build on our collaborative article of 2006, ‘Letters as/Not a Genre’, to consider the ongoing pacts, politics and arts in written relationship and the mixed methods that academics might adopt in analysing the growing archives of digital and digitised communication. As with our earlier piece, the essay is written as a dialogue, enacting our view that epistolarity enables the performance of self, though one that depends quite obviously on another.