Letters in the Story - Narrative-Epistolary Fiction From Aphra Behn to the Victorians

First study of a long tradition of mixed-mode writing, largely favored by British women novelists, that combined fully-transcribed letters with third-person narrative.

List of contents

Preface: 'To the reader'; Introduction: The letters in the story; 1. Framing narratives and the hermeneutics of suspicion; 2. Letters and empirical evidence; 3. Cultural expectations and encapsulating letters; 4. Epistolary Peripeteia; 5. Hermeneutics of perspective.

About the author

Eve Tavor Bannet is George Lynn Cross Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma. Her monographs include Empire of Letters (Cambridge, 2005), Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading (Cambridge, 2011), Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading (Cambridge, 2017) and The Domestic Revolution (2000).

Summary

Combining literary and historical analysis, this book offers the first study of largely female-authored novels that used embedded letters and third-person narrative to explore reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, challenging empiricism on its own ground in plots centred on mysteries of identity.

Product details

• Authors: Eve Tavor Bannet, Eve Tavor (University of Oklahoma) Bannet, Eve Tavor Bannet, Eve (University of Oklahoma) Tavor Bannet
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.10.2021
• EAN: 9781316518854
• ISBN: 978-1-316-51885-4
• No. of pages: 280
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form