Maria Löschnigg (editor) - The Epistolary Renaissance: A Critical Approach to Contemporary Letter Narratives in Anglophone Fiction

The Epistolary Renaissance

Buchreihe der ANGLIA/ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by
Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke,
Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf

Advisory Board
Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine,
Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen,
Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien,
Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

Volume 62

For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/36292

ISBN 978-3-11-058202-4

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-058481-3

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-058217-8

ISSN 0340-5435

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951861

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

www.degruyter.com

Maria Lschnigg and Rebekka Schuh

Without any doubt, epistolary forms have seen a renaissance in contemporary fiction. This is not least because, according to Toni but has also prompted a new interest in conventional epistolary forms. This may be explained, on the one hand, by the great meta-discursive potential inherent in a combination of staged digital forms and actual letters. On the other hand, it may be expressive of an urge to counterbalance cultural practices which largely exclude the material and sensual aspects of writing and reading. A third factor that could explain the renewed interest in the letter is its potential for defamiliarization. Paradoxically, an old form has been adopted and adapted to render new forms of narrative expression for a generation of readers who are largely unfamiliar with or no longer practice this form of communication.

Since todays society is pervaded through and through, and even constituted, by electronic and digital mass media (on the quality and truth-value of precisely these new forms of communication. The critical meta-discursive impact is even more visible in T. R. Richmonds What She Left , which combines digital forms of information presentation with conventional letters. Other British examples of such fictions of the Internet are David Llewellyns Eleven (2006), Matt Beaumonts e (2000) and e Squared ( e2 ) (2009), and Lucy Kellaways Who Moved My BlackBerry (2005), the latter staging Special Projects Director Martin Lukes as the real author of the book. The young adult novel PS. Hes Mine! (2000) is a collaboration between British writer Rosie Rushton and German writer Nina Schindler that embeds e-mails within the frame of a third-person narrative. Another noteworthy novel in this context is Where Rainbows End (2004) by Irish author Cecelia Ahern. Like What She Left , her novel mixes digital and conventional formats, marking the different modes by icons. A bestselling US-American example would be Maria Semples Whered You Go, Bernadette (2012), where the main characters daughter collects correspondence such as e-mails, memos, transcripts, and conventional letters in order to find her mother. Douglas Couplands The Gum Thief (2007) and Lynn Coadys The Antagonist (2013) may be listed as Canadian representatives of this medialized novelistic form. Through their high degree of meta-fictional self-reflexivity, such medialized epistolary novels have a strong critical impact with regard to contemporary culture. As Nnning and Rupp (2013: 215) point out, they more often than not parody or satirize the media formats they incorporate [] and not only disclose literary fictionality but also direct attention to the border crossings which turn up every time one tries to translate real events into verbal or medial narratives or into medial formats of any kind.

While it is hardly surprising that the Internet has brought forth a catalytic change (cf. Nnning & Rupp 2013: 202) in narrative fiction, it may seem astonishing that alongside the great amount of medialized epistolary fiction that has appeared over the past two decades the conventional letter has not only refused to disappear but has, in fact, made a comeback. Thus, one may claim that the epistolary renaissance that can be observed from the last decades of the twentieth century onwards is defined not only by the integration of staged digital modes, but also by a new interest in conventional epistolary forms such as letters, postcards and (handwritten) notes. This trend is visible, in particular, in the genre of the short story, but can also be discerned in the novel. Novels which solely use conventional epistolary forms include, for example, Irish author Cecilia Aherns PS, I Love You , which features enveloped notes, American Jessica Brockmoles Letters from Skye , which is mediated exclusively via letters, and Canadian author Richard B. Wrights novel Clara Callan (2001), which tells the story through letters and diary entries.

Various factors may be responsible for this remarkable revival of conventional epistolarity. First, as is the case for example with Clara Callan , which is set in the interwar years, and with a number of epistolary short stories (see chapter one/Part II of this volume, The Epistolary Short Story and the Representation of History), the letter is an ideal means to transmit the aspect of historicity in stories set in a pre-digital time. Second, the epistolary mode has been taken up and successfully appropriated for feminist and postcolonial forms of expression, where the act of writing back finds its congenial format in the you-related make-up of the letter. Third, in an age defined by digital communication, the conventional letter, as mentioned above, is a powerful tool of defamiliarization. It seems, in fact, that by including the archaic form of the letter, contemporary fiction acquires the function of a counter-cultural discourse by setting itself off from the noise of our time, thus rechanneling reflected emotionality into the fact-lived discursive practices of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century.

The counter-cultural impact of conventional epistolarity also results from specific features of the letter that go beyond the textual level and may be subsumed under the category of the materiality of the letter. The material and sensual quality of the letter, which on the one hand caters to nostalgic trends, derives, on the other hand, from a need to reintegrate sensual aspects of communication and thus to redress the alienation from the physical and sensual which defines modern forms of communication. This longing for material evidence, for example, leads Annie, the main female character of Nick Hornbys novel Juliet, Naked (2009), to print out an e-mail from former rock-star Tucker Crowe, with whom she is about to start a romance, and to put it in an envelope in order to feel the magic of a real letter (cf. 121f.). A letter, in short, is a concrete entity with a multitude of significations that go beyond its textual content and linguistic style. From the crackling of the paper, its texture and colour, the idiosyncrasy of handwriting, the choice of pen or pencil in digital modes of communication and the frustration that, in the case of Annie, goes with it: