Buchreihe Der Anglia / Anglia Book Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World: Five Contemporary American Case Studies, Book 83, (Hardcover)

<p>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 <em>Griffin &amp; Sabine</em> series (1991-2016), Gordon Lish's <em>Epigraph</em> (1996), Mark Dunn's <em>Ella Minnow Pea</em> (2001), Marilynne Robinson's <em>Gilead</em> (2004), and Louise Erdrich's <em>Future Home of the Living God</em> (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. </p>

• Buchreihe Der Anglia / Anglia Book Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World: Five Contemporary American Case Studies, Book 83, (Hardcover)
• Author: de Gruyter
• ISBN: 9783111155081
• Format: Hardcover
• Publication Date: 2024-11-18
• Page Count: 159