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epistolary novel
(redirected from Epistolary literature)

   Also found in: Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.07 sec.

epistolary novel

Novel in the form of a series of letters written by one or more characters. It allows the author to present the characters' thoughts without interference, convey events with dramatic immediacy, and present events from several points of view. It was one of the first novelistic forms to be developed. It was foreshadowed by Aphra Behn's poem cycle Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1683). The outstanding early example is Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740); distinguished later works include Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771) and Pierre Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). The genre remained popular up to the 19th century. Its reliance on subjective points of view makes it the forerunner of the modern psychological novel.



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? Mentioned in ? References in periodicals archive
 
Classen's "Female Epistolary Literature from Antiquity to the Present: An Introduction," Studia Neophilologica 60 (1988): 3-13 may be suggested.
Jensen, "Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or, How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France," in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, Elizabeth Goldsmith, ed.
A clear example of the correspondent-addressee relationship characteristic of epistolary literature can be found in those sonnets addressed to other poets.
 
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