ne of the oldest references to a love letter dates to Indian mythology of more than 5000 years ago. Mentioned in the Bhagavatha Purana, book 10, chapter 52, it is addressed by princess Rukmini to king Krishna and carried to him by her Brahmin messenger Sunanda.
Examples from Ancient Egypt range from the most formal, and possibly practical – "The royal widow . . . Ankhesenamun wrote a letter to the king of the Hittites, Egypt's old enemy, begging him to send one of his sons to Egypt to marry her" – to the down-to-earth: Let me "bathe in thy presence, that I may let thee see my beauty in my tunic of finest linen, when it is wet".[A fine expression of literary skill can be found in Imperial China: when a heroine, faced with an arranged marriage, wrote to her childhood sweetheart, he exclaimed, "What choice talent speaks in her well-chosen words . . . everything breathes the style of a Li T'ai Po. How on earth can anyone want to marry her off to some humdrum clod?"
In Ancient Rome, "the tricky construction and reception of the love letter" formed the center of Ovid's Ars Amatoria or Art of Love: "The love letter is situated at the core of Ovidian erotics".The Middle Ages saw the formal development of the Ars dictaminis, including the art of the love letter from opening to close. For salutations, "the scale in love letters is nicely graded from 'To the noble and discreet lady P., adorned with every elegance, greeting' to the lyrical fervors of 'Half of my soul and light of my eyes . . . greeting, and that delight which is beyond all word and deed to express'". The substance similarly "ranges from doubtful equivoque to exquisite and fantastic dreaming", rising to appeals for "the assurance 'that you care for me the way I care for you'".
The love letter continued to be taught as a skill at the start of the eighteenth century, as in Richard Steele's Spectator. Perhaps in reaction, the artificiality of the concept came to be distrusted by the Romantics: "'A love-letter? My letter – a love-letter? It . . . came straight from my heart'".
20th Century
The love letter continued to flourish in the first half of the twentieth-century – F Scott Fitzgerald gives us a 1920s Flapper 'absorbed in composing one of those non-committal, marvelously elusive letters that only a young girl can write'.
Before the development of widespread means of telecommunications, letters were one of the few ways for a distant couple to remain in contact, particularly in wartime. The strains on either end of such a relationship could intensify emotions and lead to letters going beyond simple communication to expressions of love, longing and desires. It is claimed that the very act of writing can trigger feelings of love in the writer. Secrecy, delays in transit, and the exigencies of maneuvers could further complicate the communication between two parties, whatever their degree of involvement. So precious could love letters be that even already read ones would even be brought into battle and read again for solace during a break in the action. Others would defer, compartmentalizing their feelings and leaving a letter folded away where it would cause no pain.
In the second half of the century, with the coming of a more permissive society - and the immediacy afforded by the technology of the Information Age, the nuanced art of the love letter became old-fashioned, even anachronistic.
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Answer:
ne of the oldest references to a love letter dates to Indian mythology of more than 5000 years ago. Mentioned in the Bhagavatha Purana, book 10, chapter 52, it is addressed by princess Rukmini to king Krishna and carried to him by her Brahmin messenger Sunanda.
Examples from Ancient Egypt range from the most formal, and possibly practical – "The royal widow . . . Ankhesenamun wrote a letter to the king of the Hittites, Egypt's old enemy, begging him to send one of his sons to Egypt to marry her" – to the down-to-earth: Let me "bathe in thy presence, that I may let thee see my beauty in my tunic of finest linen, when it is wet".[A fine expression of literary skill can be found in Imperial China: when a heroine, faced with an arranged marriage, wrote to her childhood sweetheart, he exclaimed, "What choice talent speaks in her well-chosen words . . . everything breathes the style of a Li T'ai Po. How on earth can anyone want to marry her off to some humdrum clod?"
In Ancient Rome, "the tricky construction and reception of the love letter" formed the center of Ovid's Ars Amatoria or Art of Love: "The love letter is situated at the core of Ovidian erotics".The Middle Ages saw the formal development of the Ars dictaminis, including the art of the love letter from opening to close. For salutations, "the scale in love letters is nicely graded from 'To the noble and discreet lady P., adorned with every elegance, greeting' to the lyrical fervors of 'Half of my soul and light of my eyes . . . greeting, and that delight which is beyond all word and deed to express'". The substance similarly "ranges from doubtful equivoque to exquisite and fantastic dreaming", rising to appeals for "the assurance 'that you care for me the way I care for you'".
The love letter continued to be taught as a skill at the start of the eighteenth century, as in Richard Steele's Spectator. Perhaps in reaction, the artificiality of the concept came to be distrusted by the Romantics: "'A love-letter? My letter – a love-letter? It . . . came straight from my heart'".
20th Century
The love letter continued to flourish in the first half of the twentieth-century – F Scott Fitzgerald gives us a 1920s Flapper 'absorbed in composing one of those non-committal, marvelously elusive letters that only a young girl can write'.
Before the development of widespread means of telecommunications, letters were one of the few ways for a distant couple to remain in contact, particularly in wartime. The strains on either end of such a relationship could intensify emotions and lead to letters going beyond simple communication to expressions of love, longing and desires. It is claimed that the very act of writing can trigger feelings of love in the writer. Secrecy, delays in transit, and the exigencies of maneuvers could further complicate the communication between two parties, whatever their degree of involvement. So precious could love letters be that even already read ones would even be brought into battle and read again for solace during a break in the action. Others would defer, compartmentalizing their feelings and leaving a letter folded away where it would cause no pain.
In the second half of the century, with the coming of a more permissive society - and the immediacy afforded by the technology of the Information Age, the nuanced art of the love letter became old-fashioned, even anachronistic.
Explanation:
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