Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World - (Buchreihe Der Anglia / Anglia Book) by Sindija Franzetti (Hardcover)
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Highlights
- The study intervenes in a field hitherto dominated by formal and historical analyses of the literary letter.
- About the Author: Sindija Franzetti, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
- 159 Pages
- Literary Criticism, European
- Series Name: Buchreihe Der Anglia / Anglia Book
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About the Book
Digital communication technologies have given rise to faster and more immediate forms of interpersonal communication. Along these developments, letters have made a powerful return in contemporary fiction; the trend has scholars calling for new approBook Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Sindija Franzetti, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
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