Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction: ‘Re-write, sign, seal and send’

   • Kym Brindle

   Pages 3-19

3. Diary and Letter Strategies Past and Present

   • Kym Brindle

   Pages 21-35

4. Riddles and Relics: Critical Correspondence in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance and The Biographer’s Tale

   • Kym Brindle

   Pages 36-63

5. Spectral Diarists: Sarah Waters’s Affinity and Melissa Pritchard’s Selene of the Spirits

   • Kym Brindle

   Pages 64-90

6. A Deviant Device: Diary Dissembling in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

   • Kym Brindle

   Pages 91-117

7. Lewis Carroll and the Curious Theatre of Modernity: Epistolary Pursuit in Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me

   • Kym Brindle

   Pages 118-146

8. Dissident Diarists: Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

   • Kym Brindle

   Pages 147-170

9. Postscript: Treasures and Pleasures

   • Kym Brindle

   Pages 171-174

10. Back Matter

    Pages 175-224

    PDF

Neo-Victorian writers invoke conflicting viewpoints in diaries, letters, etc. to creatively retrace the past in fragmentary and contradictory ways. This book explores the complex desires involved in epistolary discoveries of 'hidden' Victorians, offering new insight into the creative synthesising of critical thought within the neo-Victorian novel.

• Neo-victorian
• literature
• diaries
• letters
• epistolary
• fiction
• fragment
• novel
• Victorian era
• British and Irish Literature

Kym Brindle is Associate Lecturer in English Literature at Edge hill University, UK. She obtained her PhD from Lancaster University, UK for an AHRC funded study of neo-Victorian fiction and has published essays on the genre in edited collections and the Journal of Neo Victorian Studies.

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