Cambridge University Press The Letters in the Story: Narrative-Epistolary Fiction from Aphra Behn to the Victorians

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 multi-lateral 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. Review '… I applaud Bannet's experimental reinvestigation of letters in fiction, which inaugurates a different, important way of reading them as purposefully bound to narrative.' Laura Rotunno, Review19 'Eve Tavor Bannet … tells two intertwined stories. One uncovers the unique mixed genre of 'narrative-epistolary fiction'; the other examines how 18th- and 19th-century narrative-epistolary fiction joined with romance and mystery genres to engage with empiricist and positivist thought … I applaud Bannet's experimental re-investigation of letters in fiction, which inaugurates a different, important way of reading them as purposefully bound to narrative.' Laura Rotunno, Review19 Book Description First study of a long tradition of mixed-mode writing, largely favored by British women novelists, that combined fully-transcribed letters with third-person narrative. About the Author Eve Tavor Bannet is George Lynn Cross Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma. Her monographs include Empire of Letters (Cambridge, 2005), Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading (Cambridge, 2011), Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading (Cambridge, 2017) and The Domestic Revolution (2000).