Epistle novel

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Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister , title page of the first edition from 1684.

A letter novel is a collection of fictitious letters which in their presentation - possibly held together by an editor's voice - condense into a novel plot. Correspondence between different people is possible, such as the legacy of a single hero. Because of its fiction of immediacy, the diary novel is comparable to the letter novel.

history

The beginning of the genre is difficult to determine. Editions of letters Scholars emerged with humanism , and fictitious correspondence supplemented the repertoire in satirical and political collections. The correspondence between Abelard and Heloise, integrated in Jean de Meung's novel de la Rose (1280), gives the amorous variant an even longer story. In the 17th century the Lettres Portugaises were famous in this field with imitations and extensions and answers. Crossing the border between the fictional and the reality savored the letter collections of Madame d'Aulnoy .

Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Noble-Man and his Sister (1684/85/87) can be regarded as the first large-scale letter novel to play with all the art of novels - the novel of a desperate love between the heroine and her sister's husband. The initial mixture of letters full of hopelessness, longing and despair gives way to intrigue; Letters are launched and withheld, carefully drafted in order to manipulate; a considerable range of emotions is savored before the heroes end up ruined.

properties

With Aphra Behn's novel, the merits of the genre were clear:

  • Reality is effectively asserted with her - the editor presents letters that are supposed to have actually passed back and forth between those involved,
  • The style finds new freedoms in the epistolary novel: here it is not a novelist who can be expected to be a storyteller, people write here who did not suspect that their letters would one day be read publicly - desperate, scheming, in love, sometimes breaking with everyone Conventions of the literary arts,
  • Perspective and knowledge become complex manageable in the epistolary novel: here it is not an author who already knows what is happening writes, here actors who do not know what the other actors are writing, subjectively, supposedly intimate and without any overview of what is happening - one The editor's vote can provide the overview at any time.

The epistolary novel in the 18th century

The novels of Samuel Richardson , which pushed for a reform of morality, reactivated the genre in the middle of the 18th century . The novel of Pamela , who was exposed to attacks on her virtue by her employer without protection, found its suitable medium in the collection of letters: the reader followed the course of events together with the addressees of the letters who, without being able to intervene, had to fear from letter to letter that the heroine meanwhile succumbed to the reprehensible man.

The novels of the second half of the 18th century opened up to the genre to the extent that intimate self-portrayal allowed them to gain insight into the psychological depth of the self writing in the confidential. The plot could be shifted inward with the letter novel. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther ( 1774 ) consistently used the genre. The first German-language epistolary novel was Sophie von La Roche's story of Fraulein von Sternheim , published in 1771.

The best-known French epistolary novels of the 18th century are Montesquieus Lettres persanes (1721, German Persian letters ), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie or The New Heloise (1761) and Choderlos de Laclos ' Les liaisons dangereuses (1782, German dangerous love affairs ). In the 19th century, subjective and intimate fictitious autobiographies took over the terrain of the letter novel, which ultimately lived primarily from the interaction of the actors.

Contemporary special form

The e-mail novel is a special form of the letter novel . As in a letter novel, the reader learns the story to be told from the correspondence ( e-mail ) of the characters involved. Due to the speed and the low formal constraints of electronic mail, the author is able to convey faster and more directly. An example in the German-speaking area is Sehnsucht Internet by Gabriele Farke. In 2006 Daniel Glattauer's novel Gut gegen Nordwind was published , which transfers the strict letter novel form to the e-mail form. Like its sequel All Seven Waves (2009), it gets by without explanations: Mail follows mail.

Cecelia Ahern developed another special form in her novel Forever Maybe , in which the protagonists have known each other from childhood and grow up together, but later live apart and finally find each other again. The novel itself consists only of countless pieces of paper, letters, SMS and emails exchanged at school, from which the reader has to develop the story himself. Only the last page of the book breaks with this system and changes to classical prose.

Examples

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Diary literature in: Microsoft Encarta