The Heart in the Glass Jar: Love Letters, Bodies, and the Law in Mexico (The Mexican Experience)

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Description

The Heart within the Glass Jar begins with one man’s literal heart (that of a prominent statesman in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico) but is really in regards to the hearts, bodies, legal entanglements, and letters—as both symbols and material objects—of northern Mexicans from the 1860s through the 1930s.
 
William E. French’s innovative study of courtship practice and circle of relatives formation examines love letters of on a regular basis folk throughout the framework of literacy studies and explores how love letters functioned culturally and legally. French begins by situating love letters within the context of the legal system, which safe the moral order of families and communities and also perpetuated the gender order—the foundation of power structures in Mexican society. He then examines reading and writing practices within the communities that the letters came from: mining camps, villages, small towns, and the “passionate public sphere” that served as the wider social context for the love letters and crimes of passion. After all, French considers “sentimental anatomy,” the eyes, hearts, souls, and wills of novios (women and men in courting relationships), that the letters gave voice to and helped bring into being.
 
In the tradition of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, French connects intimate lives to the broader cultural moment, providing a wealthy and complex cultural history from the intersection of love and law.

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