ECU Libraries Catalog

The letters in the story : narrative-epistolary fiction from Aphra Behn to the Victorians / Eve Tavor Bannet.

Author/creator Bannet, Eve Tavor, 1947- author.
Format Book and Print
Publication Info Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York , NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Descriptionxviii, 276 pages ; 24 cm
Subject(s)
Contents Introduction: The Letters in the Story -- Framing Narratives and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion -- Letters and Empirical Evidence -- Cultural Expectations and Encapsulating Letters -- Epistolary Peripeteia -- Hermeneutics of Perspective
Abstract "The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multilateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in other formOnline version: Bannet, Eve Tavor, 1947- Letters in the story Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York , NY Cambridge University Press, 2021 9781009003698
Genre/formCriticism, interpretation, etc.
Genre/formHistory.
LCCN 2021024754
ISBN9781316518854 (hardcover)
ISBN131651885X (hardcover)
ISBN(ebook)

Available Items

Library Location Call Number Status Item Actions
Joyner General Stacks PR830 .E65 B36 2021 ✔ Available Place Hold