Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World

Five Contemporary American Case Studies
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-3-11-115508-1
Verlag: De Gruyter

Buch, Englisch, Band 83, 148 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 360 g

Reihe: Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series

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.

Zielgruppe

Scholars and students of literary, epistolary and media studies,

Autoren/Hrsg.

Franzetti, Sindija

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen

Über Autor(innen)

Sindija Franzetti, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Schweden.

Sindija Franzetti, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Schweden.