Researchers interested in same-sex romantic relationships in the nineteenth century have spent decades productively mining archives for evidence of these relationships, often finding personal correspondence and diaries to be particularly fruitful sources for information. In Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education, Pamela VanHaitsma offers an important divergence from these well-worn paths as she focuses on how the norms of romantic epistolary writing in the nineteenth century were queered. This distinction between same-sex individuals and queer practices is critical for the project of this book, allowing for a conceptual shift in emphasis from historical subjects themselves to the effects of their discourse.
Amidst an extended discussion of her methodological approach in the introductory chapter, VanHaitsma explains that she uses “queerness” to refer to “relational and rhetorical practices that were nonnormative within the context of nineteenth-century manual instruction in cultural norms and genre conventions” (italics...
