Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–1850

ISBN-13: 9780521622752 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 288 str.

Thomas O. Beebee (Pennsylvania State University)

Opis

Thomas O. Beebee offers a history of epistolary fiction as a major phenomenon practiced across Europe from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. He shows how epistolary fiction appropriated the status and power the letter had already acquired, and goes on to explore a number of related discourses and themes, including the letter writing manual, self-referential aspects of the letter, news and travel reporting, the relationship between letters and gender, and historically-specific letter writing by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors including Austen, Balzac, and Dostoevsky. There is a bibliography of major European epistolary fiction to 1850.

Recenzje

"Indispenable...The research that has gone into this book is remarkable." The Comparatist

Spis treści

Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction: letters, genealogy, power; 2. Ars dictaminis: the letter-writer in the machine; 3. Self-reflexive letters; 4. Epistolary defamiliarization; 5. The lettered woman as dialectical image; 6. A revolution in letters; 7. The ghost of epistolarity in the nineteenth-century novel; Postscript; Notes; Bibliography; Index.