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Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World: Five Contemporary American Case Studies
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Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World: Five Contemporary American Case Studies
Current price: $109.99
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Barnes and Noble
Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World: Five Contemporary American Case Studies
Current price: $109.99
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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
series (1991-2016), Gordon Lish’s
(1996), Mark Dunn’s
(2001), Marilynne Robinson’s
(2004), and Louise Erdrich’s
(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.