Postal plots in British fiction, 1840-1898 : readdressing correspondence in Victorian culture / Laura Rotunno, Associate Professor of English, Penn State Altoona, USA.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rotunno, Laura, 1971-

Series:

Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Communication in literature.

Postal service in literature.

Physical Description:

ix, 208 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Summary:

By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead. Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. By examining works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Postal Plots addresses the reasons for the letters' continued presence. It explores how Victorian postal reforms encouraged the lower and middle classes to read and write, allowed them some social and political agency, and led many to literature. Those who became writers because of postal reforms increased stratification between Victorian novelists, already struggling to define themselves as literary professionals. The reform-inspired readers threatened the novelists' development by flouting distinctions between high and low literature. Letters in Victorian novels thus become markers of the novelists' concerns about the hierarchies and mediocrities that threatened Victorian fiction's artistic progress and social contribution. Postal Plots explores Victorian literary professionals' conflict between their support for liberal ideals in the literary marketplace and their fear that they would be unable to bring those changes to pass. Book jacket.

Contents:

Correspondence culture

Mr. Micawber, letter-writing manuals, and Charles Dickens's literary professionals

Feminized correspondence, the unknown public, and the egalitarian professional of Wilkie Collins's The woman in white

From postmarks to literary professionalism in Anthony Trollope's John Caldigate

Telegraphing literature in Arthur Conan Doyle's The sign of four

Conclusion: Undelivered.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781137323798

1137323795

OCLC:

837143366