Epistolarity and World Literature, 1980-2010

Epistolarity and World Literature, 1980-2010

Author: Rachel Bower

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 331958166X

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This book examines the striking resurgence of the literary letter at the end of the long twentieth century. It explores how authors returned to epistolary conventions to create dialogue across national, linguistic and cultural borders and repositions a range of contemporary and postcolonial authors never considered together before, including Monica Ali, John Berger, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Walker. Through a series of situated readings, the book shows how the return to epistolarity is underpinned by ideals relating to dialogue and human connection. Several of the works use letters to present non-anglophone material to the anglophone reader. Others use letters to challenge policed borders: the prison, occupied territory, the nation state. Elsewhere, letters are used to connect correspondents in different cultural and linguistic contexts. Common to all of the works considered in this book is the appeal that they make to us, as readers, and the responsibility they place on us to respond to this address. By taking the epistle as its starting point and pursuing Auerbach’s speculative ideal of weltliteratur, this book turns away from the dominant trend of ‘distant reading’ in world literature, and shows that it is in the close situated analysis of form and composition that the concept of world literature emerges most clearly. This study seeks to re-think the ways in which we read world literature and shows how the literary letter, in old and new forms, speaks powerfully again in this period.


The Epistolary Renaissance

The Epistolary Renaissance

Author: Maria Löschnigg

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-09-10

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 3110582171

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Since the late twentieth century, letters in literature have seen a remarkable renaissance. The prominence of letters in recent fiction is due in part to the rediscovery, by contemporary writers, of letters as an effective tool for rendering aspects of historicity, liminality, marginalization and the expression of subjectivity vis-à-vis an ‘other’; it is also due, however, to the artistically challenging inclusion of the new electronic media of communication into fiction. While studies of epistolary fiction have so far concentrated on the eighteenth century and on thematic concerns, this volume charts the epistolary renaissance in recent literature, entering new territory by also focusing on the aesthetic implications of the epistolary mode. In particular, the essays in this volume illuminate the potential of the epistolary (including digital forms) for rendering contemporary sensitivities. The volume thus offers a comprehensive assessment of letter narratives in contemporary literature. Through its focus on the aesthetic and structural aspects of new epistolary fiction, the inclusion of various narrative forms, and the consideration of both conventional letters and their new digital kindred, The Epistolary Renaissance offers novel insight into a multi-facetted (re)new(ed) genre.


Stories in Letters - Letters in Stories

Stories in Letters - Letters in Stories

Author: Rebekka Schuh

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-10-04

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 3110726238

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This book deals with letters in Anglophone Canadian short stories of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century in the context of liminality. It argues that in the course of the epistolary renaissance, the letter – which has often been deemed to be obsolete in literature – has not only enjoyed an upsurge in novels but also migrated to the short story, thus constituting the genre of the epistolary short story. .


A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature

A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature

Author: Victoria Moul

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-01-16

Total Pages: 877

ISBN-13: 131684904X

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Latin was for many centuries the common literary language of Europe, and Latin literature of immense range, stylistic power and social and political significance was produced throughout Europe and beyond from the time of Petrarch (c.1400) well into the eighteenth century. This is the first available work devoted specifically to the enormous wealth and variety of neo-Latin literature, and offers both essential background to the understanding of this material and sixteen chapters by leading scholars which are devoted to individual forms. Each contributor relates a wide range of fascinating but now little-known texts to the handful of more familiar Latin works of the period, such as Thomas More's Utopia, Milton's Latin poetry and the works of Petrarch and Erasmus. All Latin is translated throughout the volume.


The Language of Roman Letters

The Language of Roman Letters

Author: Olivia Elder

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-10-03

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1108480160

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Explores in depth how bilingualism in the correspondence of elite Romans illuminates their lives, relationships and identities.


Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing

Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing

Author: Celeste-Marie Bernier

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2016-02-15

Total Pages: 752

ISBN-13: 0748692940

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This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.


The Impact of World War I on Marriages, Divorces, and Gender Relations in Europe

The Impact of World War I on Marriages, Divorces, and Gender Relations in Europe

Author: Sandra Brée

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-06

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0429516835

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How did WWI affect the love lives of ordinary citizens and their interactions as couples? This book focuses on how dramatic changes in living conditions affected key parts of the life course of ordinary citizens: marriage and divorce. Innovative in bringing together demographic and gender perspectives, contributions in this comparative volume draw on newly available micro-level data, as well as qualitative sources such as war diaries. In a first exploration intended to incite further research, it asks how patterns of marriage and divorce were affected by the war across Europe, and what the role of enduring change - or lack thereof - in gender relations was in shaping these patterns.


What Nostalgia Was

What Nostalgia Was

Author: Thomas Dodman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-01-05

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 022649294X

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In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.


Empire of Letters

Empire of Letters

Author: Stephanie Ann Frampton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-03

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0190915420

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Shedding new light on the history of the book in antiquity, Empire of Letters tells the story of writing at Rome at the pivotal moment of transition from Republic to Empire (c. 55 BCE-15 CE). By uniting close readings of the period's major authors with detailed analysis of material texts, it argues that the physical embodiments of writing were essential to the worldviews and self-fashioning of authors whose works took shape in them. Whether in wooden tablets, papyrus bookrolls, monumental writing in stone and bronze, or through the alphabet itself, Roman authors both idealized and competed with writing's textual forms. The academic study of the history of the book has arisen largely out of the textual abundance of the age of print, focusing on the Renaissance and after. But fewer than fifty fragments of classical Roman bookrolls survive, and even fewer lines of poetry. Understanding the history of the ancient Roman book requires us to think differently about this evidence, placing it into the context of other kinds of textual forms that survive in greater numbers, from the fragments of Greek papyri preserved in the garbage heaps of Egypt to the Latin graffiti still visible on the walls of the cities destroyed by Vesuvius. By attending carefully to this kind of material in conjunction with the rich literary testimony of the period, Empire of Letters exposes the importance of textuality itself to Roman authors, and puts the written word back at the center of Roman literature.