Epistolary Fiction in Pamphlet, Broadside, and Newsbook Publication

In the 1920s and 1930s China was swept by a “love-letter fever,” a craze for real and fictional romantic letters (qingshu). One of this trend’s most important representatives was the notoriously frivolous writer Zhang Yiping (1902-1946). This chapter places Zhang’s retranslation of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman of 1933 against the background of the young Chinese Republic’s ongoing struggles for modernity, when a multitude of theories on literature and its social functions were competing with each other. It also shows how Zhang used the prestige of a European writer in his feud with Lu Xun (1881-1936), one of China’s most influential writers. Taking the Chinese discourses as a starting point, a close reading of Letter from an Unknown Woman concludes the chapter. Beyond the framework of epistolary fiction and the love-letter genre the work reveals complex narrative strategies and literary dimensions which significantly complicate existing interpretations of Zweig’s most famous novella.

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Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel

Vicarious Narratives ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198846697.003.0006 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 180-208

Author(s):

Jeanne M. Britton

Keyword(s):

Racial Difference ◽

The Self ◽

Narrative Form ◽

Wuthering Heights ◽

Epistolary Novel ◽

Shared Identity ◽

Epistolary Fiction ◽

As If

This chapter argues that a novelistic version of sympathy negotiates transitions between oral, written, and printed texts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The mode of vicarious narration that earlier chapters locate in the decline of epistolary fiction culminates in a logic of epistolarity that justifies this novel’s narrative form. Brontë’s novel also transforms Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy through the shared identity between Heathcliff and Catherine, which returns to the extremes of familial proximity and racial difference that trouble Enlightenment notions of sympathy: Heathcliff could just as easily be Catherine’s brother or a racial “other.” After explaining that she has “watched and felt” Heathcliff’s sorrows, Catherine declares “I am Heathcliff.” This assertion suggests an assimilation of radical otherness or a complete mirroring of the self in the familial other, as if to annihilate, through the experience of shared suffering, the boundary that separates sibling from stranger.

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Isolation, Participation and Communication in Young Adult Unidirectional Epistolary Fiction

The Epistolary Renaissance ◽

10.1515/9783110584813-008 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 143-158

Keyword(s):

Young Adult ◽

Epistolary Fiction

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Epistolary fiction in Europe, 1500-1850

Choice Reviews Online ◽

10.5860/choice.37-0746 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 37 (02) ◽

pp. 37-0746-37-0746

Keyword(s):

Epistolary Fiction

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Letters to the Self: The Cloistered Writer in Nonretrospective Fiction

PMLA ◽

10.2307/461731 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 95 (1) ◽

pp. 23-41 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

H. Porter Abbott

Keyword(s):

The Self ◽

Self Perception ◽

Narrative Voice ◽

Epistolary Fiction ◽

Letter Writer ◽

Self Discovery

My field consists of those works of diary or epistolary fiction in which the author has limited the narrative voice to one diarist or letter writer. The strategy allows the author to focus on a drama of self-perception involving two main participants: the diarist and the text. The outcome of the drama basically depends on how the diarists write and how they read what they write. In the first part of my essay, I treat the drama of successful self-discovery through representative works by Tennyson, Mauriac, Bernanos, Sartre, and Gide. In the second part, I treat Werther, Lermontov’s Pechorin, and Mariane of the Lettres portugaises as writers who use their literary mode in essentially the opposite way: to maintain an existing idea of themselves.

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