The study intervenes in a field hitherto dominated by formal and historical analyses of the literary letter. Across the five case studies, the method of reading epistolarity as a motif is applied to a selection of American novels published after 1990: Nick Bantock's Griffin & Sabine series (1991-2016), Gordon Lish's Epigraph (1996), Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea (2001), Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2004), and Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God (2017). The texts encompass considerable formal and thematic variations: Bantock seeks a return to the literary letter; Lish and Dunn test the limitations of letters for conveying individual experience to a distant other; Robinson and Erdrich envision epistolarity as an address to a future. Exploring the employment of epistolarity as a motif, the study offers an interpretation of the messages these fictions extend for readers in a post-letter world. Communication technologies and practices may change, but epistolarity as a motif - a reprise of a scene of encounter that depends on keeping a distance between addresser and addressee – remains a deeply compelling site of inquiry in twenty-first-century literature.
eBook - ePub
Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World
Five Contemporary American Case Studies
- 159 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Subtopic
English Literary CriticismIndex
LiteratureTable of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- Chapter One The Epistolary Novel and Epistolarity
- Chapter Two The Post-Letter World
- Chapter Three Re(dis)covering Epistolarity with Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine Series
- Chapter Four Communion Through Letters in Gordon Lish’s Epigraph
- Chapter Five A World Without Letters: The Case of Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea
- Chapter Six A Father’s Letter to the Future: Epistolarity as a Legacy in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead
- Chapter Seven “This Notebook, Your Letter”: The Future Reader and the Pivotal Present in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God
- Coda
- Index
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Yes, you can access Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World by Sindija Franzetti in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.