The series Philologus. Supplemente / Philologus. Supplementary Volumes publishes monographs and edited volumes pertaining to all aspects of the study of ancient literature and its reception, with a ...special focus on interdisciplinary approaches, combining Classics with Literary and Cultural Studies.
Elizabeth Hewitt uncovers the centrality of letter-writing to antebellum American literature. She argues that many canonical American authors turned to the epistolary form as an idealised genre ...through which to consider the challenges of American democracy before the Civil War. The letter was the vital technology of social intercourse in the nineteenth century and was adopted as an exemplary genre in which authors from Crevecoeur and Adams through Jefferson, to Emerson, Melville, Dickinson and Whitman, could theorise the social and political themes that were so crucial to their respective literary projects. They interrogated the political possibilities of social intercourse through the practice and analysis of correspondence. Hewitt argues that although correspondence is generally only conceived as a biographical archive, it must instead be understood as a significant genre through which these early authors made sense of social and political relations in the nation.
Clarissa on the Continent defines and explores two strategies of literary translation—creative vs. preservative and strong vs. weak—as they transform one of the most influential English novels. ...Thomas Beebee compares the two opposing strategies as they influence the French translation of Clarissa by the novelist Antione François de Prévost and the German translation by the Göttingen Orientalist Johann David Michaelis, and in doing so he demonstrates that each translator found authority for his procedure within the text itself. Each translation is also examined in light of Richardson's other writings and placed in its literary and cultural context.
This study uses translations in order to interpret Clarissa , to show how the basis for the novel's reception on the Continent was laid, and to explore the differences and interactions among three literary and cultural systems of the eighteenth century. The close examination of these two important translations enable the formulation of not only a theory of creative vs. preservative translation but also the interconnections between literary theory and translation theory. Beebee also looks at later translations of Clarissa as products of literary and historical change and at Prévostian strategies of the novel.
The first referenece to letter writing occurs in the first text of western literature, Homer's Iliad. From the very beginning, Greeks were enthusiastic letter writers, and letter writing became a ...distinct literary genre. Letters were included in the works of historians but they also formed the basis of works of fiction, and the formal substructure for many kinds of poem.
Patricia Rosenmeyer, an authority on the history of the Greek letter, assembles in this book a representative selection of such 'literary letters', from Aelian and Alciphron to Philostrartus and the supposed letters of Themistocles.
The book will be valuable for all students of Greek literature especially those studying Greek (and Latin) letter.
1. Classical Greek Literary Letters 2. Hellenistic Literary Letters 3. Letters and Prose Fictions of the Second Sophistic 4. The Epistolary Novella 5. Pseudo-Historical Letter Collections of the Second Sophistic 6. Invented Correspondences, Imaginary Voices
Extravagant narratives MacArthur, Elizabeth Jane; MacArthur, Elizabeth Jane
2014., 20140701, 2014, 1990, Letnik:
1057
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Challenging the view of epistolary narrative as a faulty precursor to the nineteenth-century realist novel, Elizabeth MacArthur argues that the openness and flexibility that characterize ...correspondences, both real and fictional, reflect the preoccupations of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her readings of the Lettres portugaises, Mme du Deffand's correspondence with Horace Walpole, and Rousseau's La Nouvelle Hlose propose an alternative to closure-oriented theories of narrative as they uncover an interplay between two forces: a tendency towards closure and meaning (metaphor) and a tendency towards openness and desire (metonymy). While such an interplay structures all narrative, the epistolary form differs from the third or first person in the extent to which metonymy predominates. The author shows how critics and editors of correspondences have attempted to control their metonymy, channeling epistolary energy into univocal meaning. By juxtaposing real and fictional epistolary works, MacArthur reveals the similarities between the two, particularly their "extravagance": ambiguity, openness, and forward-moving energy.
Originally published in 1990.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
What distinguishes Clarissa from Samuel Richardson's other novels is Richardson's unique awareness of how his plot would end. In the inevitability of its conclusion, in its engagement with virtually ...every category of human experience, and in its author's desire to communicate religious truth, E. Derek Taylor suggests, Clarissa truly is the Paradise Lost of the eighteenth century. Arguing that Clarissa's cohesiveness and intellectual rigor have suffered from the limitations of the Lockean model frequently applied to the novel, Taylor turns to the writings of John Norris, a well-known disciple of the theosophy of Nicolas Malebranche. Allusions to this first of Locke's philosophical critics appear in each of the novel's installments, and Taylor persuasively documents how Norris's ideas provided Richardson with a usefully un-Lockean rhetorical grounding for Clarissa. Further, the writings of early feminists like Norris's intellectual ally Mary Astell, who viewed her arguments on behalf of women as compatible with her conservative and deeply held religious and political views, provide Richardson with the combination of progressive feminism and conservative theology that animate the novel. In a convincing twist, Taylor offers a closely argued analysis of Lovelace's oft- stated declaration that he will not be 'out-Norris'd' or 'out-plotted' by Clarissa, showing how the plot of the novel and the plot of all humans exist, in the context of Richardson's grand theological experiment, within, through, and by a concurrence of divine energy.
The epistolary novel is a form which has been neglected in most accounts of the development of the novel. This book argues that the way that the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented ...consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel. Critics have drawn a distinction between the self at the time of writing and the self at the time at which events or emotions were experienced. This book demonstrates that the tensions within consciousness are the result of a continual interaction between the two selves of the letter-writer and charts the oscillation between these two selves in the epistolary novels of, amongst others, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith.
Joe Bray lectures in Literary Stylistics at the University of Stirling, having previously held positions at the Universities of Strathclyde, Cambridge and Luton. He has published on Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen and is co-editor of Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page (Ashgate, 2000).
InAddressing the Letter, Laura A. Salsini considers how the works of authors including the Marchesa Colombi, Sibilla Aleramo, Gianna Manzini, Natalia Ginzburg, and Oriana Fallaci highlight such ...issues as love, the loss of ideals, lack of communication and connection, and feminist ideology.
Postal culture Romani, Gabriella
Postal culture,
2013, 2013, 2013-12-31
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The nationalization of the postal service in Italy transformed post-unification letter writing as a cultural medium. Both a harbinger of progress and an expanded, more efficient means of circulating ...information, the national postal service served as a bridge between the private world of personal communication and the public arena of information exchange and production of public opinion. As a growing number of people read and wrote letters, they became part of a larger community that regarded the letter not only as an important channel in the process of information exchange, but also as a necessary instrument in the education and modernization of the nation.
In Postal Culture , Gabriella Romani examines the role of the letter in Italian literature, cultural production, communication, and politics. She argues that the reading and writing of letters, along with epistolary fiction, epistolary manuals, and correspondence published in newspapers, fostered a sense of community and national identity and thus became a force for social change.