Read complete books and articles on: Epistolary Literature

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14 of the Best Books and Articles on: Epistolary Literature

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Epistolary Novel: Representation of Consciousness » Read Now
by Joe Bray. 154 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

The epistolary novel is a form which has been neglected in most accounts of the development of the novel. This book argues that the way that the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel. Critics have drawn a distinction between the...
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The epistolary novel is a form which has been neglected in most accounts of the development of the novel. This book argues that the way that the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel. Critics have drawn a distinction between the self at the time of writing and the self at the time at which events or emotions were experienced. This book demonstrates that the tensions within consciousness are the result of a continual interaction between the two selves of the letter-writer and charts the oscillation between these two selves in the epistolary novels of, amongst others, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith.
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2.

Introduction 1. 'Dear Reader': Definitions of the Epistolary Self, in Journal of European Studies » Read Now
by Jan Montefiore. 9 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
3.

Introduction 2. 'Anxiously Yours': The Epistolary Self and the Culture of Concern, in Journal of European Studies » Read Now
by Nicky Hallett. 11 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
4.

Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters » Read Now
by Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook. 244 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Proceeding from the perspective of Jurgen Habermas's public sphere theory, this book studies the popular eighteenth-century genre of the epistolary narrative through readings of four works: Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), Richardson's Clarissa (1749-50), Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni...
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Proceeding from the perspective of Jurgen Habermas's public sphere theory, this book studies the popular eighteenth-century genre of the epistolary narrative through readings of four works: Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), Richardson's Clarissa (1749-50), Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782). The author situates epistolary narratives in the contexts of eighteenth-century print culture: the rise of new models of readership and the newly influential role of the author; the model of contract derived from liberal political theory as it relates to new writer/reader relations; and the techniques and aesthetics of mechanical reproduction. Writing at the paradoxical crossroads of public and private, epistolary authors used the genre to formulate a range of responses to a cultural anxiety about private energies and appetites, particularly those of women, as well as to legitimate their own authorial practices. Just as the socialcontract increasingly came to be seen as the organizing instrument of public, civic relations in this period, the author argues that the epistolary novel serves analogously in the ostensible private sphere of affective relations to produce, socialize, and regulate the private subject as a citizen of the Republic of Letters.
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5.

The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Chap. 4 "Into Writing: Epistolary Commerce in the Republic of Letters") » Read Now
by Dena Goodman. 338 pgs.

Collections: History, Literature, Entire Library
6.

Epistolary Responses: The Letter in 20th-Century American Fiction and Criticism » Read Now
by Anne Bower. 226 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Letters - a most traditional and old-fashioned form of discourse - continue to offer special opportunities for writers and readers in the postmodern era. Bower explores the way letters shape the act of writing and writing as act. Epistolary Responses uses a variety of theoretical approaches (chiefly...
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Letters - a most traditional and old-fashioned form of discourse - continue to offer special opportunities for writers and readers in the postmodern era. Bower explores the way letters shape the act of writing and writing as act. Epistolary Responses uses a variety of theoretical approaches (chiefly feminist and reader response) to analyze seven novels, all featuring women letter writers: Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters, Upton Sinclair's Another Pamela, John Updike's S., Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, and John Barth's LETTERS (in which six men also write letters, but the central and most original epistolarian is female). Punctuated with various letters - from novel authors and critics - Epistolary Responses enacts some of the give and take of the subject matter and provides some sense of the collective or composite textuality.
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7.

Virtue's Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women's Fiction » Read Now
by April Alliston. 322 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Challenging current notions of the transmission of a literary tradition, this study recontextualises the works of neglected eighteenth-century women writers.
8.

Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion (Chap. 2 "The Epistolary Machine") » Read Now
by Julie Candler Hayes. 243 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Reading the French Enlightenment offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of eighteenth-century thought, the rationalizing and classifying impulse or "systematic spirit." Julie Candler Hayes surveys the past fifty years of philosophical reflection on the Enlightenment, and takes...
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Reading the French Enlightenment offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of eighteenth-century thought, the rationalizing and classifying impulse or "systematic spirit." Julie Candler Hayes surveys the past fifty years of philosophical reflection on the Enlightenment, and takes issue both with traditional liberal and with contemporary critical accounts, arguing instead for a new understanding of "systematic reason" as complex, paradoxical, and ultimately liberating. Through close analysis of philosophical, scientific, and literary texts, she emphasizes the urgency of maintaining a dialogue between past and present, Enlightenment and modernity.
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9.

Women on the Italian Literary Scene: A Panorama (Chap. Five "The Epistolary Novel") » Read Now
by Alba Della Fazia Amoia. 151 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
10.

Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre » Read Now
by Karen Cherewatuk, Ulrike Wiethaus. 222 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature , ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith...Albrecht Classen, "Female Epistolary Literature from Antiquity to the Present...also Classen...
11.

Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature » Read Now
by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer. 370 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This book offers the first comprehensive look at the use of imaginary letters in Greek literature from Homer to Philostratus. By imaginary letters, it means letters written in the voice of another, and either inserted into a narrative (epic, historiography, tragedy, the novel), or comprising a...
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This book offers the first comprehensive look at the use of imaginary letters in Greek literature from Homer to Philostratus. By imaginary letters, it means letters written in the voice of another, and either inserted into a narrative (epic, historiography, tragedy, the novel), or comprising a free-standing collection (e.g. the Greek love letter collections of the Imperial Roman period). The book challenges the notion that Ovid "invented" the fictional letter form in the Heroides, and considers a wealth of Greek antecedents for the later European epistolary novel tradition.
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12.

Re-visions, Re-flections, Re-creations: Epistolarity in Novels by Contemporary Women, in Twentieth Century Literature » Read Now
by Elizabeth Campbell. 17 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Sartre associates the open (epistolary) literature of the eighteenth century...be surprising that most epistolary literature from Ovids Heroides to present-day...Previous...
13.

The Epistolary Ethos of Formal Satire, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language » Read Now
by Steven Shelburne. 31 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...English satirists return the epistolary ethos of Ciceronian amity...Satire," Studies in English Literature 23 ( 1983 ): 61-76; and esp...emphasis in Renaissance English...
14.

Out of Epistolary Practice: E-Mail from Emerson, Post-Cards to Pynchon, in American Literary History » Read Now
by Oliver Harris. 11 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...epoch of so-called literature, if not all of...Derridas incomparable epistolary text is not only...last rites for literature and the letter...interest in the epistolary...