Epistolary Novels Research Articles

The Letter‐Writing Manual and the Epistolary Novel

AbstractThe relationship between real and fictional letters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has been the source of much critical debate. Disagreement surrounds the extent to which the increasingly popular genre of the epistolary novel drew on the practices and techniques of actual correspondence. On the one hand are those who see epistolary fiction as developing out of real‐life letters, with some literary‐stylistic additions. On the other hand are those who reject this teleological approach in favour of one that emphasizes the functional versatility of the letter in the period, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of drawing a distinction between its real and fictional incarnations. This relationship between real correspondence and epistolary fiction is brought into sharp focus by the genre of the letter‐writing manual, which rose sharply in popularity from the last two decades of the seventeenth century onwards. Concentrating on John Hill's The Young Secretary's Guide (1689), Thomas Goodman's The Experience's Secretary (1699), and G. F.'s The Secretary's Guide (1705), in particular, in this article, I suggest that the style of the letter‐writing manual from this period can, with caution, be compared with that of the epistolary novel. I pay particular attention to the ways in which letters in these manuals respond to and quote from each other and the often subtle ways in which they thus incorporate different voices. This polyvocality is taken further in Samuel Richardson's manual Familiar Letters (1741), which, as is well known, provided the raw material for his first novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1741). I demonstrate that some of the stylistic techniques which would prove crucial to the great epistolary novels of the later eighteenth century, including Richardson's, can be found, at least in embryonic form, in the letter‐writing manuals of the Restoration period.

Privacy in Prefaces to Epistolary Novels Published by Claude Barbin

Privacy in Prefaces to Epistolary Novels Published by Claude Barbin

PRIPOVEDAČKI POSTUPAK VESNE KAPOR U ROMANU „NEBO, TAKO DUBOKO“

The paper analyses Vesna Kapor’s novel Nebo, tako duboko, with spe- cial attention paid to the nature of the narrative. The Kapor’s novel belongs to the type of lyrical novel because the plot of the narrative remains in the background. There are several different focalizers who tell the story by expressing their feelings. The features of epistolary novels can be recognised in Kapor’s work as well, since the story is actually presented through letters written by different characters. The paper deals with composi- tion and structure of the novel, as well as different narrative elements and specific literary devices used to tell the story.

Female Desire in the Epistolary Novels of South Slavic Women Writers (Hanka by Slovene Croat Writer Zofka Kveder and Jedno dopisivanje by Serbian writer Julka Chlapec-Đorđević)

This paper, which deals with Central European literature in the comparative perspective, contains an analysis of the representation of intimacy and love (female desire) in the epistolary novels Hanka (1918) written by the Slovene Croat writer and feminist Zofka Kveder (1878-1926) and Jedno dopisivanje. Fragmenti romana (A Correspondence. Fragments of a Novel, 1932) by the Serbian writer and feminist Julka Chlapec-Đorđević (1882-1969). Both of these South Slavic women writers and feminists were cultural nomads with multiple linguistic identities, part of the Habsburgian myth, and they lived for a time in Prague, then an important city of European modernism and the avant-garde. In the novels, they created a picture of a new woman and her intimate world, focusing on the motifs of love and extramarital affairs. In the novel Hanka, readers follow the thematization of the new independent woman and her intimacy in the chaos of the apocalypse of the First World War, focusing on representations of the idealized love of a woman for a man and a woman’s suppressed desire. Julka Chlapec-Đorđević inherited the legacy of Zofka Kveder in Prague, and her novel Jedno dopisivanje is an homage to Kveder’s artistic achievements. The writer depicts gender intimacy in fictitious letters between Marija Prohasková from Prague and her lover Oton Šrepan, a doctor from Slovenia. In both case studies, the representation of the secret love affair and writer´s understanding of intimacy and romantic love as the key concepts of modernity will be examined.

"Confidences épistolaires de la Vénus publique": Real-time Communication, Voyeuristic Reading, and Social Media's Erotic Pre-History in the Petite Correspondance

Abstract: In 1875, Parisian daily Le Figaro introduced a personal advertising column called the petite correspondance , which allowed people to write to each other using the newspaper as mediator, avoiding home addresses and the watchful parents or spouses who lived at them. The often-amorous exchanges this facilitated, some fictional (commissioned by the newspaper to entice readers), some real, drew on older forms, such as epistolary novels. In this way, they catered to readers' established taste for voyeurism while drawing them into a new erotic temporality, as these notes were simultaneously exchanged and voyeuristically read. Created in the very years that witnessed the conception of laws granting press freedom and setting the stage for a redefinition of "pornography," the section brought together press and sexuality in novel ways, laying the groundwork for the forms of voyeuristic reading and exhibitionist living we—through social media—are steeped in today.

Kirjažanrist Euroopa kultuuriloos ning kirjavahetuste avaldamisest ja uurimisest Eestis

The article deals with the emergence, development and blooming of the letter genre in European cultural history until the middle of the 20th century. The oldest letters that have survived to our time date from the 3rd-2nd centuries BC and are written in cuneiform. The first major heyday of the literary genre was in the time of ancient Rome, when both politicians and philosophers exchanged letters, but also several writers used the letter form in their works. The so-called canon of letter writing was formed in the Middle Ages, when the art of letter writing began to be taught at the universities. In the 17th century, letter writing manuals and private letters began to be published in books, and in the 18th century it was already very common. The growing popularity of communication by letters is also shown by the fact that in the middle of the 18th century, when English writer Samuel Richardson published three novels in the form of letters, the epistolary novel was born. In the epistolary novels, for the first time the world of feelings and thoughts of the characters was under observation. At the end of the 19th century, communication by letters increased drastically due to the wider spread of literacy throughout Europe. The writing of letters intensified during the First and Second World Wars, which is considered the last major blooming of the letter genre. This fact is also confirmed by studies on the development of the written communication tradition in Estonia. The article also provides a brief overview about the research and publication of private correspondences in Estonia. In the middle of the 20th century, the Estonian Literary Museum began to systematically deal with the autobiographical heritage (incl. letters) of those persons who had a prominent position in cultural history. In 1984, the serial publication Litteraria: eesti kirjandusloo allikmaterjale (Litteraria: Estonian Literary History Source Materials; since 2005 Litteraria: Estonian Cultural History Source Materials) was founded with the aim of making correspondences, but also various biographical notes, photographs, etc., available to the public. Litteraria has never been published regularly; nevertheless, by 2023 the series had published already twenty-eight issues, which are now also available online (https://www.kirmus.ee/et/teadus/e-litteraria). In 1998, Tuna: Ajalookultuuri ajakiri (The Past: Journal of Historical Culture) came out on the landscape of social science and humanities journals. The new journal included the rubric “Estonian Cultural History Archives”, which allowed the researchers to regularly publish archival sources with commentary four times a year. Over the years, several voluminous text-critical publications of correspondences have been published in parallel with the issues of Litteraria and Tuna, for example, “Akadeemia kirjades” (“Academy in letters”, Olesk 1997), “Minu lamp põleb” (“My lamp is on”, Annuk & Metste 2015), and “Kallid krantsid: Kirjad vangilaagritest ja asumiselt Siberis 1946–1954” (“Dear friends: Letters from prison camps and deportation sites in Siberia 1946–1954”, Kross 2021). The published correspondences have a different historical background, but the common feature of all the authors of the letters is their close connection with Estonian literature. Several historians, literary scholars, cultural historians, folklorists, and philosophers have used private correspondences as source material for their in-depth studies. The analysis of scientific articles of the last decades shows that letters are useful primarily as a source of information that helps to open the hidden aspects of some cultural-historical phenomenon or historical event, for example, the world wars. In addition, different aspects of epistolary practices are also analysed, such as the peculiarities of means of expression, communicativeness or intersubjectivity of letters, etc. Until the turn of the century, prominent creative figures in Estonian cultural history dominated among the authors of the letters used in the studies. In recent decades, a new trend has emerged which shows that researchers have begun to pay more attention to, for example, the love letters and war letters of ordinary people, as well as letters in which the writer shares with the addressee various information about joys and worries of everyday life.

Епістолярний роман в класиці літератури: прецедент «Португальських листів» Ґієраґа та «Листів перуанки» Ф. де Ґрафіньї

The dynamics of the text’s stay in the circle of literary classics becomes clear only over time: the experience of epistolary novels of the Enlightenment is very indicative of many aspects of literary production. “Portuguese Letters” by Guilleragues (second half of the XVIIth century) and “Letters from a Peruvian” by F. de Graffigny (middle of the XVIIIth century) offer material for understanding the mechanisms of the novel’s timeless success. These texts have experienced powerful recognition, oblivion, and rediscovery throughout history. From the history of creation, genre canon, literary process to the system of motives, rhetoric, figures, and metaphors – everything in these works is a kaleidoscope of the widest readership. The extra-literary factors and intra-textual mechanisms of the two novels by Guilleragues and F. de Graffigny together shed light on the secret of the power of the work in the context of the classics of literature. At the same time, they encourage us to check the essence of such categories as author’s mystification, fictionality, mimeticity in the communication arch of an artistic work. The article reveals these questions, which allows us to introduce the “Portuguese Letters” of Guilleragues and the “Letters from a Peruvian” by F. de Graffigny into the circle of current issues of modern literary studies to fill the gap in Ukrainian literary studies around the theme of the formation, flowering, and power of the epistolary genre in the history of French literature.

A “Wild and Ambiguous Medium”: Democracy, Interiority, and the Early American Epistolary Novel

AbstractThis essay argues that early American novelists’ sustained commitment to epistolary fiction reflects their recognition that the mediated access it offered to inner life made it a potent vehicle for highlighting the limits of our ability to decipher the concealed interiorities of other people. Faced with the question of how novels might best prepare readers for republican social and political life, novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson turned to this increasingly outmoded form because it foregrounded the uncertainties inherent in reading inner life. Eschewing third-person fiction’s fantasy of direct access to another mind, these novels foster an epistemological humility regarding other interiorities that would be valuable in negotiating civic life in the early republic. While early American novels have long been regarded as encouraging sympathetic identification as a means of establishing political union, novels such as Brown’s Clara Howard and Rowson’s Sincerity instead harness the epistolary novel’s partial, uncertain revelations of interiority to highlight our inability to access fully someone else’s thoughts or feelings. These novels warn readers that successfully navigating the epistemological challenges of this new democratic social order requires resisting the fantasy that another person’s true feelings can ever be fully known.Rowson and Brown saw epistolary novels as a means of not just teaching Americans how to read inner life, but also of cautioning them that they could never do so with certainty.

Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel

Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel

The Author is Dead, Long Live the Author! Postmodern Metanarrative and the Performance of the Author Function

This research paper critically examines the meta-narrative text The Master of Petersburg, a novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, which has the figure of the author at the centre of its narrative structure. In his fictions, Coetzee is not shy of dislodging what Roland Barthes calls ‘reality effect’ in order to critically assert the role of the authorial figure; this is also to be seen in the novel Slow Man where Coetzee ruptures the realist texture of the narrative by introducing the figure of Elizabeth Costello who enters the text, as well as the life of Paul Rayment an amputee, as the author figure who is responsible for her creation i.e. Paul Rayment himself. At the same time Coetzee in order to explore the issues of writing at its ethical dimension, transforms some realist tropes at his disposal. For instance, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee with a brilliant manoeuvre plays on the trope of epistolary novels and presents the novel in a form of a series of lectures delivered by Elizabeth Costello, an Australian author of international fame. But in a brilliant ironical move, Coetzee through the performance of the authorial voice breaks the realist structure of the Novel. The paper will, however, primarily focus on the novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), which is a meta-narrative in which Coetzee actively interrogates the ethics of writing as in this novel he places the fictively re-imagined figure of Dostoevsky in Petersburg in late 1868, after the murder of his step-son Pavel. In this novel like his earlier novel Foe(1986), Coetzee examines the process of artistic creation and ethics involved in the event of writing, as Coetzee in his novel evokes a mix of historical factors and fictive characteristics which inspired and featured in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils. Through a close examination of the interstitial spaces between the two novels, this paper explores the figure of the author and its performance in postmodern fiction. The author as the figure has caused much debate in the postmodern fiction and narrative theory. Post Roland Barthes’s declaration ‘author is dead’ many deconstructionist and narrative theories have debated the relevance of author figure in fiction, and the meta-narrative and self-referential nature of postmodern literature make these debates even more potent. This paper seeks to explore the debate concerning the author figure from Bakhtin, Barthes, Bennet and Foucault and try to understand the implications which the author figure has in a postmodern text through a close examination of Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg.

„Astra. Roman epistolar” de Dito şi Idem – un caz de istorie literară

The literary collaboration between Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz under the pseudonym “Dito und Idem” was a real accomplishment in the 19th century not only in Romania, but on the whole European continent. After a series of individual projects on translations of Romanian literature into German, Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz began their literary collaboration (1882-1889). The main aim of the literary project was to promote the Romanian literature and culture in Western and Central Europe. Therefore, the project produced two epistolary novels (Aus zwei Welten, Astra) with a real success on the book market. As a result of their attainment, only one novel was translated in Romania. The epistolary novel Astra was published in 1886 in German and translated and printed in feuilleton, in Romania, the same year. Taking everything into account, the study looks into the manner in which Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz managed to use literary methods characteristic to the feuilleton-novel (pickling technique, narrative “seduction”, sensational plot etc.) which assured a consistent distribution of the novel. Furthermore, the comparison between the feuilleton-format and book format of the novel Astra offered us a new perspective on the transition of translated novels into the pages of a feuilleton. All in all, the literary collaboration between Dito and Idem represents a whole page in the literary history of the Romanian novel.

A Study on Literary Educational significance of epistolary novels — Focused on “New Year’s Eve”, “Why Don’t the Pilgrims Come Back”

A Study on Literary Educational significance of epistolary novels — Focused on “New Year’s Eve”, “Why Don’t the Pilgrims Come Back”

Hiperión como novela epistolar

El objetivo del presente artículo es abordar la interrelación entre el género epistolar y el Bildungsroman en Hiperión, de Friedrich Hölderlin. Sus características como novela epistolar son congruentes con sus características como Bildungsroman, por lo que se encuentra justificado el género epistolar. De tal forma, el elemento de intimidad, la necesidad de un interlocutor y el tratamiento fragmentario del tiempo propios de la novela epistolar son funcionales a la formación del protagonista y del lector y al manejo temporal inherentes al Bildungsroman, respectivamente. Se analizarán ambos géneros (teórica y específicamente en la novela) y las mencionadas características en Hiperión.

Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni's Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice by Marijn S. Kaplan

Reviewed by: Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni's Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice by Marijn S. Kaplan Jeanne Hageman Kaplan, Marijn S. Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni's Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice. Routledge, 2020. ISBN 978-0-367-85852-0. Pp. 174. This study examines one of the eighteenth century's most prolific female author's feminism in her epistolary novels, as well as in her actual correspondence with some of the most influential men of her time. The author's premise is that the reader cannot completely comprehend Riccoboni's feminism until her works (with a focus on her epistolary novels, the fiction, and her actual correspondence) and the facts are juxtaposed and examined as a whole. The author divides the work into two parts, beginning with Riccoboni's epistolary novels and concluding with her personal letters, yet both provide clear evidence to support her theory that Riccoboni was aware of the inseparable relationship between fact, fiction, and feminism. The first five chapters contain a thorough analysis of Riccoboni's epistolary novels. Kaplan undertakes a careful and critical examination of Riccoboni's ability to blend fact and fiction in her epistolary novels, and analyzes the feminist sentiments of the author. Since the chapters present her works in chronological order, it is easy for the reader to follow the development of Riccoboni's feminist ideas. Kaplan provides a clear analysis and carefully examines the role of the voice, both male and female, in the novels, and demonstrates how even in novels commonly considered to be lacking female voice, Riccoboni reiterates the importance of female agency, and manages to subvert or even silence the male voices to allow the female voices to be heard. In the final chapter of the first part, Kaplan provides is unique presentation of Riccoboni's work and, when considered with the previous chapter, provides an exceptional example of how easily female voice and power could be erased in the male-dominated literary world of the eighteenth century. Both chapters discuss the Lettres de Mylord Rivers, but while the [End Page 226] first presents the original Riccoboni work as a vindication of the female voice, the following chapter examines how the first English translation undermines and seeks to remove the feminist voice in the novel. Kaplan provides a careful reading of the translator's added notes and a completely new paragraph inserted into the English translation by the male translator. She shows, through careful comparison, how easily Riccoboni's feminist message could be undermined or made to completely disappear. The second part of the work carefully examines the letters Riccoboni sends to the Mercure de France, letters written for publication. Kaplan examines how these letters show Riccoboni's understanding of the need to at times confront the male voices that abounded on the pages of these newspapers. Kaplan also considers how Riccoboni's private correspondence shows that Riccoboni's feminism was not reserved for her novels. Since many of the letters discussed are not well known, an appendix provides the letters in French and English. This thoughtful and intriguing work invites readers to reexamine Riccoboni's epistolary novels in a new way, and to reconsider the role of her proto-feminism in her fiction as well as in her correspondence. The study provides a new and informative understanding of Riccoboni's works for anyone studying or teaching her works. Jeanne Hageman North Dakota State University Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice by Marijn S. Kaplan

Reviewed by: Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice by Marijn S. Kaplan Tessa Ashlin Nunn Kaplan, Marijn S. Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice. Routledge, 2020. Pp. 184, ISBN 9781003047803. $44.05 (ebook). ISBN 978-0-367-85852-0. $160 (cloth). Few book-length studies examine the life and work of novelist, journalist, actress, and translator Marie Jeanne Riccoboni (1713-1792). Marijn S. Kaplan underscores Riccoboni's role in the European feminist Enlightenment and points to the factors leading to her erasure from the eighteenth-century canon. Using the epistolary form as a vehicle for proto-feminist thought, Riccoboni promoted authority and autonomy for female voices. The first half of the book analyzes how Riccoboni's epistolary novels make feminist statements by silencing male voices, creating female spaces, and narrating the self. Her first novel, Lettres de Fanni Butlerd, blends fiction and facts from the novelist's life to make the personal public and to hold her former lover accountable for his acts. Whereas feminist scholars often protest against [End Page 181] reading women's novels as confessions, Kaplan interprets the use of autobiographical elements as a feminist praxis. Drawing on Janet G. Altman's argument that the letter is a metonym of the letter writer, Kaplan shows how the plurality of female voices in Riccoboni's novels creates self-sufficient female spaces where letter writing and friendship replace marriage. As Kaplan argues, female friendships and widowhood appear as methods for surviving eighteenthcentury patriarchy. Throughout her novels and short stories, Riccoboni grapples with the possibilities of feminine existence in marriage which, in her view, must be based on friendship. Though scholars tend to consider Riccoboni's last novel, Lettres de Mylord Rivers, to be her least feminist novel, Kaplan reads it as her most poignantly feminist work. This polyphonic novel suggests that men and women can coexist in harmony only when women possess authoritative voices, men respect women's speech, and no one is silenced. Studying Percival Stockdale's 1778 translation Letters from Lord Rivers, Kaplan examines how translations exaggerate, change, or eliminate feminist arguments. With new paragraphs and numerous footnotes, Stockdale's translation presents men as victims of women's attempts to gain rights and compares coquettish women to slave owners. English translations of Riccoboni's novels and letters greatly influenced the international reception and perceptions of this author. Riccoboni's indignation against sexism stands out in her novels as well as her letters, several of which she published. In the second half of the book, Kaplan examines Riccoboni's correspondence with men such as Denis Diderot, David Hume, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, David Garrick, and Philip Thicknesse. These letters, nineteen of which are included in the appendix with meticulous English translations, attest to how Riccoboni used publication to gain authority. One of her letters to Diderot delineates her concept of theatricality that must remain distinct from nature. Finally, her letters reveal her thoughts on the pirated editions of her works as well as the denigrated status of women writers. This book is essential for scholars of eighteenth-century women writers. Additionally, researchers interested in epistolary novels, theater studies, translation, and early feminism will find it relevant to their respective fields. Kaplan summarizes the novels in such a way that her analyses are understandable for readers unfamiliar with Riccoboni's work. Though Kaplan avoids comparisons between eighteenth-century epistolary feminism and twenty-firstcentury feminist practices, she gestures toward numerous connections that instructors can develop in the classroom. Accessible and engaging, this monograph offers new perspectives on eighteenth-century proto-feminism and the possibilities of letter writing. Tessa Ashlin Nunn Duke University Copyright © 2021 Women in French Studies

Writing women on the verge of individuality … Citizen subject, consumption and power in the nineteenth-century Swedish novel

ABSTRACT Three letter-writing nineteenth-century heroines lay out domestic worlds to their fictional readers in which moral sentiment and norms of citizenship versus individual desire are at stake. In an era of nascent capitalism and nation building, these are aspects of significance. But what role does writing letters play? And what impact do epistolary novels have on citizenship and gender at the time? With Michel Foucault and Étienne Balibar as theoretical framework, this article discusses three epistolary novels—The Illusions (1836) by Sophie von Knorring in connection to Grannarne (1837) by Fredrika Bremer and Araminta May (1838) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist—in order to discern how female writing produces the gendered citizen.

In Their Father's Library: Books Furnish Not Only a Room, But Also a Tradition

In Their Father’s Library: Books Furnish Not Only a Room, But Also a Tradition ELIZABETH POWERS Although they shared close life dates and became famous in the same years for their epistolary novels, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Fanny Burney (1752–1840) would seem to have been worlds apart literarily . (Goethe had in his Weimar library a copy of Evelina, while Burney was probably not ignorant of the Europe-wide sensation The Sorrows ofYoung Werther.) What might be called their literary apprenticeship, however, was remarkably similar , consisting not of schooling in a traditional institution in which students (and, importantly, most eighteenth-century writers) were drilled in the classical curriculum, but, instead, from wide reading within the confines of their fathers’ libraries . It is true that Goethe and his younger sister Cornelia were supplied at home with a number of tutors and that their progress was monitored by their father, but their acquaintance with literature was fostered within the confines of the family home. Burney had no formal education at all. Indeed, on the appearance of Evelina, her father (according to her diary) remarked : “[S]he has had very little Education but what she has given herself,—less than any of the others!” Burney, however, had the advantage of growing up in a milieu in which books mattered. While the Goethes were eminently respectable, on the mother’s side part of what was the patriciate of the city of Frankfurt, the Burney household in London was bursting with wits and with what can only be called celebrities. The Burneys knew God and the world: David Garrick, Dr. Johnarion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 116 in their father’s library son, Hester Thrale. As Virginia Woolf noted of the famous father, Dr. Charles Burney, he was a musician “who could talk of intellectual things and ask clever people to his house.” Goethe has given plenty of evidence of roaming freely among his father’s books, a collection of 1,700 calfskin-bound volumes . When Burney went to serve at the court of King George III, Queen Charlotte was disappointed at how few books the author of Evelina possessed. (Similarities accumulate: Goethe also served at court, as minister in the duchy of Weimar.) But why cart around a load of books? As Burney wrote in her diary: “[M]y Father’s most delightful Library, as I then told her [the Queen], with my free access to it, had made [owning my own books] a thing unnecessary . . . ” Libraries in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, whether private or public affairs, were not like contemporary public libraries, catering to a wide array of tastes, but were repositories of what Matthew Arnold termed “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Let’s call it the Western intellectual and cultural heritage. Most respectable homes would possess at a minimum a Bible, while the holdings in private homes, as evident in the library of Goethe’s father, could reach astounding proportions. According to Burney biographer Claire Harman, Fanny’s brother left at his death one of the finest private libraries of the age. Moreover, the antiquity of the works in the venerable libraries scattered across Europe from Dublin to Saint Petersburg, and especially their survival despite centuries of vicissitudes, was testimony to the authoritative nature of the transmission . Anyone who took the Bible in hand, who took lessons from it, adhering, for instance, to the injunctions of the Ten Commandments, was conscious of subscribing to values shared by preceding generations. Literary practitioners, also showing obeisance to authoritative predecessors, followed earlier models, in the process contributing to an evolving literary heritage. There was no purity in this transmission. It was truly promiscuous, but its quasi-biological character, like a mother’s left-handedness in a child, can be seen in the family Elizabeth Powers 117 resemblances among writers of different eras. Just as individuals perpetuate traits of their parents, so literature and the other arts recycled features of artistic predecessors. Writers as diverse in background and language and religion as Ariosto and Milton transmitted the dna, so to speak, of such epical forebears as Homer and Virgil. This sort of family legitimacy was...

Epistolary Form in the Age of the Post Office

This article examines the 1790s epistolary novels of radical women writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays in light of the British post office's rise to power under the Pitt administration. At a time when many writers abandoned letters in fiction because of mail's association with state surveillance, this particular community of radicals innovated a kind of epistolarity in which letters emphasized and exploited their association with the post's political power. Reading these novels in light of the emerging post and its effects on mail as legal evidence, I consider how such changes transformed the epistolary novel even as the genre lost popularity.

Spectres des Monstres: Post-postmodernisms, hauntology and creepypasta narratives as digital fiction

Abstract Horror has always been adaptable to developments in media and technology; this is clear in horror tales from Gothic epistolary novels to the ‘found footage’ explosion of the early 2000s via phantasmagoria and chilling radio broadcasts such as Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds (1938). It is no surprise, then, that the firm establishment of the digital age (i.e. the widespread use of Web2.0 spaces the proliferation of social media and its integration into everyday life) has created venues not just for interpersonal communication, shared interests and networking but also the potential for these venues to host a new type of horror fiction: creepypasta. However, much of the current academic attention enjoyed by digital horror fiction and creepypasta has focused on digital media’s ability to remediate a ‘folk-like’ storytelling style and an emulation of word-of-mouth communication primarily associated with urban legends and folk tales. Here, I intend to argue that creepypasta should primarily be considered a form of digital fiction due to its ability to spread narratives in a way distinct to digital textuality and intrinsically linked to the affordances of digital media. In this article, I will treat creepypasta narratives as a genre specific to the form of digital fiction – specifically a ‘fourth generation’ of digital fiction – in which ‘the [social media] platform is a significant part of the aesthetic expression and the meaning potential’ of these stories. I will argue that the affordances of social media, and the way in which they are taken advantage of by creepypasta narratives situate the phenomenon as an example of post-postmodern storytelling that embodies traits of Jeffrey Nealon’s ‘Post-postmodernism’, Alan Kirby’s ‘Digimodernism’ and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s ‘Metamodernism’. I will suggest that this postpostmodern cultural turn works hand in hand with the resurgence of a cultural ‘hauntology’ to coalesce in creepypasta as a unique type of text. While creepypasta’s hauntological qualities have previously been noted by Line Henriksen, this article will explore a relationship between creepypasta and post-postmodernism that has not yet been acknowledged. Ultimately, I will attest that the above theories describe (sometimes overlapping) symptoms of an emerging cultural period that relate to creepypasta’s meaning potential and its formal and aesthetic properties. Observations from all three theories of a post-postmodern age coalesce in creepypasta narratives, from the specific qualities of digital textuality and the unique properties of different social media platforms on which these narratives are hosted (YouTube, Reddit, webforums and so on) to the metatextuality of creepypasta works and how they depart from and retain a dialogue with postmodern horror narratives. While the cultural landscape is still in flux and what will come after postmodernism has yet to be determined, creepypasta narratives tell us that a post-postmodern age has already arrived.

Introduction

Introduction Catherine R. Montfort (bio) and Christine McCall Probes (bio) Journeys are the midwives of thought. Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel (54) The project of a volume on Women and Traveling originated at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago (January 2014) after a table ronde organized and presided by Christine McCall Probes, Voyages de femmes, entrepris et rapportés: Représentations littéraires et/ou artistiques, was particularly well received. Speakers included Linda Alcott, Hélène Diaz Brown, Arline E. Cravens, Molly Krueger Enz, Perry J. Gethner and Catherine R. Montfort. Soon after the MLA, Christine McCall Probes and Catherine R. Montfort sent a call for papers inviting scholars to submit essays on the topic Les femmes et le voyage for a Special Volume of WIF Studies. Our stated goal was to include articles ranging from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century that focused on the literary and artistic representations of women travelers—in forced voyages or not—and the rhetorical strategies employed in the past as these voyages were recorded. At the MLA session, genres and topics included representations of women travelers in plays, fantastic and mystical voyages, memoirs, epistolary novels and women travelers of color. In this volume we present case studies of women travelers and a number of analyses of travel narratives in the pre-modern and modern periods. Of course we realize that this volume is only a small token in the analysis of a genre that has encompassed "a bewildering diversity of forms, modes and itineraries" (Thompson 1-2).1 There have been many studies on traveling and many studies on male travel writers in France such as Montaigne, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand or Nerval to mention just [End Page 6] a few. There have also been studies on British and American female writers (see among others Shirley Foster, Sara Mills, Mary-Louise Pratt and Yaël Schlick).2 Strikingly there have been many fewer studies on French and Francophone female travelers and writers until recently, mostly due to historical and cultural differences.3 From Odysseus to Aeneas to the Knights of the Round Table, to Columbus to more modern times, travel has functioned as "a defining arena of agency" for men and male travel narratives have been inseparable from masculinity (Sidonie Smith ix). Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud notes in Écrire le voyage au XVIe siècle en France that Nicolas de Nicolay wrote in Dans l'Empire de Soliman le Magnifique, texte de navigations et de pérégrinations: "La raison veut et nature semble le commander à l'homme, de chercher, visiter et enquérir, savoir et connaître tous les ȇtres, toutes les parties et mansions de son universelle habitation" (44-45). Men, then, have been crusaders, adventurers, scientists, missionaries, entrepreneurs—and always narrators. While the man of the Middle Ages chose pilgrimages in his spiritual journey to God and generally had little curiosity about this world,4 the Renaissance and 17th century traveler in contrast wanted above all to be an informer telling the truth and being the "miroir du monde" here on earth. Followed "le grand tour" and educational voyages stretching roughly from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. And then in the nineteenth century, there was a shift to subjectivity. As exemplified by Chateaubriand, the "moi" prevailed and "le sujet qui voyage est l'objet du récit au mȇme titre que les territoires évoqués" (Bénédicte Monicat, Itinéraires 1). In contrast the relation of women to mobility has been problematic. In the Middle Ages, "the underlying principle that a woman's proper sphere was the private one prevailed" (Webb 80): and similarly, "the message of many prescriptive Renaissance texts was that the virtuous woman stays at home" (Hackett 126). And yet, women too, like men, have always traveled, from pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the Holy Land5 to voyages to "spas" or for health reasons, to voyages for familial obligations (especially marriages),6 to scientific voyages to accompany their husband, to lonely voyages to far-flung lands to flee the role patriarchy had allotted [End Page 7] them, but récits de voyage have...