Machiavelli and the Play-Element in Political Life

This essay interprets Machiavelli’s famous letter to Francesco Vettori in terms of a play-element that runs across his works. The letter to Vettori is a masterpiece of epistolary form, but beyond its most memorable passage, where Machiavelli recounts his evening in study, it has not received much scholarly attention. Reading the letter in its entirety is to discover Machiavelli’s account of an eclectic political education and the pleasures of playing with others. Machiavelli’s letter speaks to a basic ludicity in his political thinking, in which play is not opposed to the serious, and diverse play forms can be thought together. Hans-George Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games provide resources for reconstructing this play-element in Machiavelli’s thought.

Elizabeth Bowen’s Junk Mail

In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (1938), the novel’s victimized, orphan-heroine Portia is said to cherish a “wretched little escritoire” stuffed full, as if it “were a bin,” with junk mail. Crammed into an overflowing desk, the advertisements and begging letters that Portia collects have been rendered void: they are circulars that have been taken out of circulation. Like Portia’s desk, Bowen’s fiction is stuffed full of letters: letters sent, lost, found, returned to sender, read, unread, buried, and burned. Such letters offer an image of intimate print reduced to wastepaper. In Bowen’s fiction, the degraded materiality of print corrupts the privacy of the epistolary form, mediating the depths of feeling into clutter. And when wrongly re-circulated—as happens to the letters intercepted by the orphan Leopold in The House in Paris (1935), or the mysterious packet left behind by Guy Danby in A World of Love (1955)—junk mail transforms into a menacing remainder that shatters the boundary between the interior world of memory and consciousness and the exterior world of objects and others.

A travelogue of the second degree: “The Letters from Norway” by Isidora Sekulić as a pretext of the book about Norway of Vida Ognjenović

The work of the Serbian writer Vida Ognjenović “A Travel to a Travelogue” (2004) is dedicated to her stay in Norway and the perception of this country through the prism of the well-known Serbian travelogue “The Letters from Norway” (1914) by Isidora Sekulić. Ognjenović’s text contains not only impressions of life in Norway, but also a reflection on the travelogue genre, on the text of her predecessor and the controversy caused by Sekulić’s work. Within the framework of Serbian literature, “The Letters from Norway” became a hypotext for the perception of Norwegian culture. In addition to the extensive metatextual layer Ognjenović’s work contains “The Letters to Isidorа Sekulić from Norway”, in which the author addresses her predecessor in an epistolary form and tells her about the trip to Norway. Having studied the Norwegian route of Sekulić in detail, Ognjenović decided to repeat it and to share her impressions with an imaginary Sekulić. The hypertext by Ognjenović offers not only a new reading of the Sekulić’s travelogue, which has become a reference book for Serbian emigrants in Norway, but also contains a bold assumption that Sekulić’s “Letters” were addressed to the famous critic Jovan Skerlić, who would later call the writer “Scandiphile”, and would condemn her for lack of patriotism. Ognjenović’s travelogue with its intense intertextual connections and palimpsest elements has pronounced features of a postmodern text, but does not completely fit into the paradigm of postmodernism, occupying a borderline position between the veneration of Logos, of authority and the postmodern irony.

Lamb, Coleridge, and the Poetics of Publication

This essay explores the poetics of Lamb's early letters to Coleridge. I argue for a sharp awareness, on Lamb's part, of the potentially negative effect publication can have on literary writing. Lamb resists this at the level of epistolary form, by entwining his sonnets with the letters into which he writes them. Where Lamb's poems, taken in themselves, remain modest performances, the letter-poem hybrid texts in which they participate are of significant critical interest. Among other things they establish a critique of Coleridge and his paying court to the literary marketplace. These insights, I go on to suggest, can also help us to understand both writers’ more mature work, notably the complex lyric-epistolary compound that is Coleridge's ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’.

3. Letters of the heroines

'Letters of the heroines' eplores Ovid’s Epistulae Heroidum (Letters of the Heroines) or Heroides (Heroines), love letters sent by famous mythical women to their errant lovers. The Heroides is still love poetry, and the women are often reminiscent of the lover in the Amores, but the women and their lovers are in most cases figures from the heroic age, and this makes the collection an important link between the Amores and the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s most ambitious fusion of the erotic and the mythological. The epistolary form of these poems is vitally important, as is the influence of the rhetorical training that Ovid and his fellow Romans had undertaken, an experience that encouraged a taste for memorable turns of phrase. The debt to Hellenistic literature, Callimachus in particular, is especially clear when Ovid returns to the format, probably at the end of his career: the ‘Double Heroides’ are exchanges of letters between a male and female correspondent, and the dynamic of the form is interestingly transformed. The legacy of the Heroides is worth a mention, it is less consistently popular than Ovid’s other poetry, but was his most celebrated work in the 18th century, and an important model for female self-expression that carried with it the heft and authority of classical antiquity.

T. Smollett’s Epistolary Novel ‘The Expedition of Humphry Clinker’

This article provides a brief analysis of Tobias Smollett’s ‘The Expedition of Humphry Clinker,’ which is considered to be his best novel. Similar episodes and literary portraits had been featured in his previous works, but the epistolary form, used exclusively in this novel, contributed to lively and extremely convincing characters, as well as vivid and picturesque descriptions.

ИСПОВЕДЬ В.С. ПЕЧЕРИНА: РЕЦЕПЦИЯ АНТИЧНОЙ ТРАДИЦИИ В ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОМ ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ XIX ВЕКА

The article presents the reflection of the antique tradition in the memoirs of the Russian emigrant of the nineteenth century V.S. Pecherin. Written in epistolary form these memoirs are confessional in their character and one can traced a strong classical influence, formed by his education. Particular attention is given to Berlin as educational space, where V.S. Pecherin studied at the university and regularly visited the Altes Museum. There is a close relationship between the influence of Ancient Greek art V.S. Pecherin saw in the museum and his cultural and aesthetic views presented in his memoirs. According to the author, V.S. Pecherin presented himself as the second Xenophon wandering around Europe and expelled from his homeland in absentia. The title of the memoir Apologia pro vita mea, probably, has as its prototype both the Socratic tradition and the Christian tradition, especially expressed in the title of the work Apologia pro vita sua by John Henry Newman.

‘Shopping List’

Are the unnamed characters who write and respond to these post-it notes flatmates or lovers, friends or acquaintances? Is their relationship as fractious as this prose suggests, or does each note hold something deeper, a series of signs and indicators that gradually reveal affection between the two characters? The medium, somewhat outdated in our digital world, suggests fleeting exchanges, ships that pass in the night, all the while signalling shared space, shared responsibilities and shared lives. The implied story is as complex as the reader wants to make it, as the authors themselves use this brief epistolary form as a prompt for contemplating the mundanity of relationships, the emotional manoeuvring, assumed subtexts and back-stories of each and every moment or event. The authors are a novelist and a poet, writers each involved in their own relationships, colleagues interested in collaboration and new forms. Who is the third voice (or third and fourth voices) this dialogue has created? The story has led Lilwall and Loydell to writing the unexpected, responding to each other’s prose and shopping items in turn, surprising each other and themselves, before refining and editing the work together.

The Storyteller Returns: Hotel du Lac (1984)

The epilogue reads Hotel du Lac through the figure of the storyteller, which it links to the genius woman writer, and argues that Brookner’s Booker Prize winner proleptically anticipates her aestheticist emphasis on beauty, form and technique. Utilising Walter Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller, and iconic figures of Staël, Colette, Woolf and Proust, the storyteller is produced through narratives of exile and return and focuses on the craft of the writer and artist persona including misreading, reversal, orality, frame narrative, epistolary form, paraprosdokian and anagnorisis. Colette’s The Pure and the Impure helps contextualise Edith’s scopophilic fascination with the mother/daughter pairing of Iris and Jennifer Pusey, which symptomise as a homoerotic narrative excess in the unsent letters to her lover. Edith’s queer preoccupations further illuminate the satirical treatement of gender, love, marriage and the heterosexual romance narrative in Hotel du Lac and more broadly in Brookner’s oeuvre. Like most Brooknerines, Edith rejects conventional romance for the romance of art and women’s writing. In conclusion, this chapter reviews the cross-historical intertextual performance of creative male gender through the contemporary female subject which sanctions a host of queer possibilities between female characters and plotlines. It celebrates Brookner as consummate aesthete, artist and storyteller.