Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Letter writing – Fiction; Invalids – Fiction »

There is an emerging Ugandan queer writing tradition that adopts an activist stance to imagine an alternative Ugandan queer subjecthood beyond popular and polarising perspectives of this subjectivity that were instantiated by the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014. This emerging archive of Ugandan writing, often deploying the short fiction genre, weaves intricate tales of queer Uganda that sidestep the censorship of an ostracised sexuality deemed sinful, dangerous, and unUgandan to claim the agency and humanity of Ugandan homosexuals. While this archive of Ugandan queer short fiction has attracted significant critical attention from scholars such as Edgar Fred Nabutanyi (2017, 2018), Ken Junior Lipenga (2014) and Ben de Souza (2020), who focus on the political activism of these texts in Ugandan sexuality debates, little critical attention has been paid to how writers deploy sociolinguistic tools to empower their characters to author their agency and life experiences as same-sex loving Ugandans. Using sociolinguistic discursive tools, I refer to a textuality that includes illocutionary techniques such as letter writing, dialogue, and stream of consciousness that subversively empower excluded and muted subjects to articulate their essence and humanity. Deploying textual analysis of selected short stories, their analyses, and Ugandan queer theoretical treatises, I read Monica Arac de Nyeko’s ‘Jambula tree’ (2006) Beatrice Lamwaka’s ‘Pillar of love’ (2016) and Anthea Paleo’s ‘Picture frame’ (2013) using a sociolinguistic lens to unveil how the selected writers’ subversion of patriarchal tropes of an amorous letter, an ideal heterosexual family, and a romantic date critique the ostracisation of a sexual orientation.

Joy Davidman’s place in the canon of twentieth century American literature deserves more attention than it has heretofore received. For instance, in her role in the late 1930’s as poetry editor for New Masses (the weekly voice of the Communist Party of the United States of America), Davidman published poets such as Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Alexander Bergman, and Aaron Kramer. At the same time, her poems in Letter to a Comrade (1938) touting a Communist agenda, while clearly written in the tradition of “proletarian literature,” are nonetheless well done; although a political agenda drives her selection of subject matter in these poems, they are not simply set pieces. She uses irony effectively and her imagery is evocative and striking. In fact, Davidman was very much a conscious craftswoman, spending the summers of 1938, 1940, 1941, and 1942 at the MacDowell Colony, a writers’ retreat in New Hampshire, where she honed her skills. For instance, her best piece of fiction, Anya (1940), is a direct result of her time at the colony. She understood the intellectual energy it takes to become an effective writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and she never backed away from hard work. Her commitment to writing—especially her voice, her rhetoric, her style, and the literary influences informing her work—merit more scholarly attention. In this essay I explore Davidman’s early devotion and commitment to the craft of writing; in addition, I evaluate the poems, fiction, and non-fiction she produced before she wrote for New Masses and published Letter to a Comrade.

AbstractThe relationship between real and fictional letters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has been the source of much critical debate. Disagreement surrounds the extent to which the increasingly popular genre of the epistolary novel drew on the practices and techniques of actual correspondence. On the one hand are those who see epistolary fiction as developing out of real‐life letters, with some literary‐stylistic additions. On the other hand are those who reject this teleological approach in favour of one that emphasizes the functional versatility of the letter in the period, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of drawing a distinction between its real and fictional incarnations. This relationship between real correspondence and epistolary fiction is brought into sharp focus by the genre of the letter‐writing manual, which rose sharply in popularity from the last two decades of the seventeenth century onwards. Concentrating on John Hill's The Young Secretary's Guide (1689), Thomas Goodman's The Experience's Secretary (1699), and G. F.'s The Secretary's Guide (1705), in particular, in this article, I suggest that the style of the letter‐writing manual from this period can, with caution, be compared with that of the epistolary novel. I pay particular attention to the ways in which letters in these manuals respond to and quote from each other and the often subtle ways in which they thus incorporate different voices. This polyvocality is taken further in Samuel Richardson's manual Familiar Letters (1741), which, as is well known, provided the raw material for his first novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1741). I demonstrate that some of the stylistic techniques which would prove crucial to the great epistolary novels of the later eighteenth century, including Richardson's, can be found, at least in embryonic form, in the letter‐writing manuals of the Restoration period.

This article discusses American author Carson McCullers’ 1942 short story titled ‘Correspondence’, in order to consider how the unique form of the epistolary short story amplifies themes of alienation and absence. Drawing upon contemporary affect theory as well as a close reading of the story, I consider how the letters in the text can be understood as what Sara Ahmed describes as ‘happy objects’, as well as how the process of letter writing becomes exemplary of Lauren Berlant’s theorization of cruel optimism. Based on her own disappointment with letters and letter writing, McCullers’ short text problematizes the act of writing letters and demonstrates the complexities of epistolary short fiction.

All the female narrators of the three stories examined here – So Long a Letter, The Color Purple, and Letters from France – suffer serious traumas attributable to their male counterparts. Thus as a healing process, letter-writing is an exercise in trust that traverses the distances between the addresser and the addressee. Blurring the lines in such a way results in an intimate narration of trauma that reads as a stream of consciousness, devoid of fear of judgment or retribution. This paper studies the literary device of derision coupled with a psycho-feminist analysis to retrace the thorny, cathartic journey of trauma victims from self-hate to self-acceptance and self-agency.

Abstract On June 28, 1832, Nathaniel Hawthorne penned a letter to Franklin Pierce describing plans for a Northern tour through New York into Canada, a trip that he was forced to postpone due to the 1832 cholera outbreak in Montreal. Hawthorne intended to gather tales for The Story Teller on this ill-timed trip, but the trip was never made and the collection of interlinked traveling tales never published. The author of this note paper considers the cholera epidemic's impact on Hawthorne's writing life and how it reverberates through her own writing of historical fiction during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

Resumo: Este artigo visa apresentar algumas reflexões sobre as relações entre a escrita epistolar, a ficção e o jornal instauradas em textos publicados por Aluísio Azevedo, Lúcio de Mendonça e Júlio Ribeiro em fins do século XIX no Brasil. A partir da leitura de suas obras Mattos, Malta ou Matta?, O marido da adúltera e Cartas sertanejas, respectivamente, busca-se tecer aproximações entre a carta e o jornal, de forma a destacar as confluências que marcam estes suportes de escrita cotidiana, bem como evidenciar certo diálogo instaurado por estes autores com os anônimos leitores das folhas diárias, diálogo que denota uma nova percepção política de seu tempo e um novo estilo literário, o naturalismo.Palavras-chave: carta; jornal; ficção.Abstract: This article aims to present reflections about the relations among epistolary writing, fiction and newspaper in the writings of Aluísio Azevedo, Lúcio de Mendonça and Júlio Ribeiro at the end of the 19th century in Brazil. Those reflections are based on the author’s pieces of writing Mattos, Malta ou Matta?, O marido da adúltera and Cartas sertanejas, respectively. We attempt to draw approximations between the letter and the newspaper so as to highlight the similarities of such daily life texts as well as to establish connections between these authors and their anonymous readers of daily news. Such connection evidences a new political perception at that time and a new literary style – naturalism.Keywords: letter; newspaper; fiction.

This essay examines Hathorne's concept of language and the characteristic indeterminacy of his writing in the context of nieteenth-century language study. Recently, two opposing theoretical postionss have emerged to account for this indeterminacy-the deconstructionist view as exemplified by J. Hillis Miller's analysis of "The Minister's Black Veil" and the more historical and political view that Jonathan Arac Takes in "The Politics of The Scarlet Letter." I argue that although Hawthorne's indeterminacy may invite a deconstructionist analysis, it is a product of his historical context, not ours, and although, as Arac argues. Hawthornes's indeterminacy may be connected to a politics of avoidance, it more directly arises out of the linguistic and philosophical issues being debated by his contemporaries. In his Notebooks and his fiction Hawthorne responds to these issues by experimenting with possible relations between literal and figurative meanings and with the role played by perspective in determining these meanings. In order to show the interaction bertweenn Hawthorne's writing and the context of mindineteenth-century language study, I first briefly outline this context; then, using examples from his Notebooks. I describe Hawthorne's concept of language; and finally, with "Rappaccini's Daughter" as an example. I show how in his fiction Hawthorne experiments with the language theories of his contemporaries.

Abstract In 1995, a two-page-long letter signed by Professor Maud Michell-Bailey – which furthermore enclosed two original poems by Christabel LaMotte – prefaced a special edition on women poets in the academic journal Victorian Poetry. The letter and poems invite a critical return to Possession, since they are a complex game in which made-up characters come to life and actual people are fictionalized. They also raise significant theoretical issues while appearing to break free from the limitations imposed by what Victorian Poetry editor Linda Hughes has correctly described as “overdetermined readings, simplification, distortion” (6). In doing so, they masterfully create a parodic and intertextual dialogue in an inverted mirror game that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined and invites the reader to engage in an active participation. When combined, Maud’s letter and LaMotte’s poems offer an intriguing look at the fruitful fusion of A.S. Byatt's critical and literary imagination. Therefore, this article explores Byatt’s intersections between academia, literary criticism, and fiction by analysing her metafictional discourse on fictional Victorian poems vis-à-vis the real contemporary academic journal in which they were published.