In attempting to analyze the form and function of personal letters for genre classification in literature, three fundamental questions need to be addressed: Can personal letters be considered imaginative? Can the writer of personal letters (the signer) be considered an author? What are the historical precedents for an affirmative response?

It can be argued that personal letter writing is not literature because it is not imaginative; however, in the eighteenth century, letter writing represented both experience and imagination. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, in Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (1996), outlines a contradiction in the connotations of the letter in the Enlightenment period, and the complexity persists today. Cook notes the paradox that the letter is the "most direct, sincere, and transparent form of written communication" while, on the other hand, it is "simultaneously recognized as the most playful and potentially deceptive of forms, as a stage for rhetorical trickery" (16). Robert Halsband also notes this contradiction in Samuel Johnson's practice of letter writing. Johnson indulges in both poles of "the great epistolick art" and acknowledges that "there is, indeed, no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse." Halsband concludes that the personal letter is "the most liberal of all literary forms" (Dr. Johnson 18, 19). In the reference, "liberal" implies a sense of freedom, extravagance, art and invention, which suggests that the letter is imaginative and, therefore, that it is literature.

Cook outlines the development of letter writing as a genre of literature. She opens her study with a quotation from Michel Foucault's essay, "What is an Author?" in which he makes a distinction between the letter writer and the author:

In a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the 'author function,' while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer--it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor--it does not have an author. . . . The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society. (5)

Cook's response to this definition is the basis of her scholarly and well-argued book, which I will discuss in a moment.

My response to Foucault's assertion focuses on the two terms "private letter" and "circulation." Logically, if either or both of these factors change, then the assertion no longer holds. If the "private letter" becomes public and enters into "circulation," then it is axiomatic that the "signer" also becomes "endowed with the 'author function.'" This, precisely, has occurred with the McQuesten private letters which have now entered the public domain of the archive at Whitehern Museum, the Archives of Ontario, the Hamilton Public Library, McMaster Library and the Presbyterian Archives. The letters have also been researched for the writing of two biographies of Thomas B. McQuesten, for biographical sketches in the Dictionary of Hamilton Biography, and for several public lectures and articles and, therefore, are now "characteristic" of the "functioning of certain discourses within a society" (5). The purpose of my research is to broaden the circulation, and to present the letters for literary, interdisciplinary and cultural studies. Therefore, the McQuesten "signer[s]" have become transformed into "author[s]" and their letters have become literature.

Furthermore, we can argue that the McQuesten "authors" were aware of the "circulation" possibilities in their collection. The unique circumstance of the conscious accumulation and preservation of the letters by three generations of the McQuesten family suggests an awareness of posterity, and of value and readership beyond the mere addressee of each letter. Indeed, they initiated the process in their bequest agreement