000			02002cam a22001938i 4500
020			_a9781316518854
082	0	0	_a823.009 BAN.L
100	1		_aBannet, Eve Tavor,
245	1	4	_aletters in the story : _bnarrative-epistolary fiction from Aphra Behn to the Victorians / _cEve Tavor Bannet.
260			_aCambridge _bCUP _c2022
300			_apages cm
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references and index.
505	0		_aIntroduction: The Letters in the Story -- Framing Narratives and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion -- Letters and Empirical Evidence -- Cultural Expectations and Encapsulating Letters -- Epistolary Peripeteia -- Hermeneutics of Perspective
520			_a"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 multilateral 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"--
650		0	_aEpistolary fiction, English
650		0	_aNarration (Rhetoric)
650		7	_aLITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
942			_cBK
999			_c675663 _d675663