Epistolarity in a Post-Letter World

The study intervenes in a field hitherto dominated by formal and historical analyses of the literary letter. Across the five case studies, the method of reading epistolarity as a motif is applied to a selection of American novels published after 1990: Nick Bantocks Griffin & Sabine series (1991-2016), Gordon Lishs Epigraph (1996), Mark Dunns Ella Minnow Pea (2001), Marilynne Robinsons Gilead (2004), and Louise Erdrichs Future Home of the Living God (2017). The texts encompass considerable formal and thematic variations: Bantock seeks a return to the literary letter; Lish and Dunn test the limitations of letters for conveying individual experience to a distant other; Robinson and Erdrich envision epistolarity as an address to a future. Exploring the employment of epistolarity as a motif, the study offers an interpretation of the messages these fictions extend for readers in a post-letter world. Communication technologies and practices may change, but epistolarity as a motif - a reprise of a scene of encounter that depends on keeping a distance between addresser and addressee remains a deeply compelling site of inquiry in twenty-first-century literature.