‘those letters keep me going’: Epistolary spaces and resilience-building processes in US soldiers to sweetheart war correspondence, 1942 to 1945

Resilience is a complex social construct that is theoretically and methodologically challenging to research. Historically concerned with individual capacity to overcome adversity, the significance of diverse social and cultural contexts for understanding resilience is gaining in recognition (Ungar, 2008). In this chapter we examine an archive of soldiers’ letters home as a source for inquiry into resilience processes. What can we learn about resilience from letters? Letters can reflect the social, political, economic, historical and cultural contexts in which they are written and are connected with real lives in particular times and places (Stanley, 2004). The acts of reading and writing connect correspondents, temporarily transcending absence and the distances of time, space and location. Epistolary inquiry is an inductive process leading to a deeper analysis of the complex interconnections between writing about individual experiences and changing social contexts over time.