The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860–1920

A fascinating account of how ordinary people met the challenges of literacy in modern Europe, as distances between people increased.

Martyn Lyons (Author)

9781107018891, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 October 2012

292 pages, 20 b/w illus. 3 maps
23.1 x 15.5 x 2 cm, 0.56 kg

'[This book] offers a strong corrective to those who would read letters, postcards, diaries, memory books and other forms of communication penned by the poor and undereducated of rural Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for content alone.' Kate Flint, European History Quarterly

As war and mass emigration across oceans increased the distances between ordinary people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of them, previously barely literate and unaccustomed to writing, began to communicate on paper. This fascinating account explores this surge of ordinary writing, how people met the new challenges of literacy and the importance of scribal culture to the history of individual experience in modern Europe. Focusing on correspondence and other writing genres produced by French and Italian soldiers in the trenches in the First World War, as well as Spanish emigrants to the Americas, the book reveals how these writings were influenced by dialect and oral speech and were oblivious to the rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation. Through their sometimes moving stories, we gain an insight into the importance to ordinary peasants of family, village and nation at a time of rapid social and cultural change.

1. Ordinary writings, extraordinary authors
2. Archives for an alternative history
3. 'Excuse my bad writing'
4. Literary temptations
5. France: transparency and disguise in the poilus' letters, 1914–18
6. France: national identity from below and the discovery of the 'lost provinces', 1914–19
7. Family, village and motherland in Italian soldiers' writing, 1915–18
8. Italian identities 'from below' and ordinary writings from the Trentino
9. Love, death, and writing on the Italian Front, 1915–18
10. Spain: emergency literacy and the nostalgia of exile, 1820s–1920s
11. Family strategy and individual identities in Spanish emigrants' letters
12. Order and disorder in the 'memory books'
13. Conclusions
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD], History [HB]