The 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.

Eve Tavor Bannet (Author)

9781009001823, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2024

296 pages
23 x 15.1 x 1.8 cm, 0.452 kg

'… breaks new scholarly ground in delineating a little-known novelistic tradition she terms “narrative-epistolary fiction” for the first time. … this important study shows how letters embedded in narratives are best understood as making meaning together collaboratively. In illuminating this point, Bannet brilliantly maps out the critical territory needed for new kinds of conversations about the relationship between the epistolary and the novel form, both in this period and beyond.' Crystal Biggin, Women's Writing

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 multi-lateral 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]