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This article analyzes the ritual dimensions of Tibetan epistolary style. By examining the material aspects of handwritten Tibetan epistles—paper size and shape, script size and style, text spacing and margins—along with the formal instructions found in Tibetan epistolary manuals, I show how an epistle's physical constitution renders two bodies performing a symbolic display of hierarchy on the page. This display of hierarchy is most dramatic in the genre of the epistle offered to a superior, in which the body of the writer bows in homage before the body of the recipient. I use this study to contribute to a Tibetan hermeneutic that reads texts as devotional subjects with ritual agency. More broadly, I also argue that bibliographical analysis (focused on a text's physical production and material features) can radically shift an understanding of the genre in which that text participates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In important accounts of Mary Davys's short epistolary work Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (1725), Riley (1995) and Wakely (2005) suggest Davys subverts the amatory mode through its Whig, and feminist, inversion of the Tory seduction narrative. This paper's identification of an early edition of the text, printed for J. Roberts, and attributed to the pseudonym "Dick Fisher" in 1718 complicates these accounts while providing a new vantage point from which to read the text. Importantly, new prefatory and paratextual material associated with the publication demonstrate both Davys's commercial acumen and the porous character of the book trade in the early eighteenth century. Using this publication as a case study, this paper examines authorial agency and the complex nature of book production in the early British book trade, arguing that understanding such multiplicities is necessary for the reading of early women writers and their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to carry out an analysis of the novel Efectos del amor propio (c. 1810) using a broader theoretical framework than the one that has been used so far to study it. Thus, we consider that it can be typified as "autofiction", a type of novel in which the identity of the main character and that of the author are mixed up, and which is conditioned by a new way of understanding artistic creation that emerged in the early nineteenth century: the "expressive theory of art", applicable to works whose main purpose was the intimate venting of the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, primarily, explores the extent to which Fred Khumalo's novel, Bitches' Brew, can be considered a jazz novel by looking at both its subject matter and form. It argues that the transgressive power of Khumalo's novel lies in its use of epistolary form as a narrative strategy that is akin to a jazz solo, marked as it is by a dialogical narrative that is similar to the call and response pattern that bears an affinity to a jazz performance. In terms of the subject matter, the central thrust of the argument is that the over-arching predominance of sex and violence in the text threatens to overshadow the musicality of the text, even as masculinity and misogyny are considered as the other side of the coin of jazz. In its exploration of the jazz and gender interface, this paper highlights how the phallocratic logic that informs and dominates the novel is indicative of the fact that Khumalo may have 'pushed the envelope' too far in his representation of masculinity and misogyny in jazz culture in his writing of this work. That Khumalo's novel fails to interrogate the relationship between jazz and black masculinity, but rather endorses and valorises it, serves to reinforce the stereotype of misogyny in jazz culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I publish two previously unpublished letters sent by Daniel Klesch in the summer of 1677 to Peter Lambeck, a confidant of Emperor Leopold I, the historian and scholar, who was the head of the imperial court library. In the paper accompanying the text edition, I examine in more detail the philosophical and poetological ramifications of the letters. The pastor of Spišská Nová Ves (Hung. Igló, Ger. Iglau) had already sent his letters from his exile in Germany, apparently with the aim of gaining favor with Emperor Leopold and the title of Comes Palatii Caesarei. The letters in question are not unknown to Hungarian literary history, but I have been able to clarify several unanswered questions about them and, most importantly, to identify the prints sent with the letters. The pastor also reports on several of his poetic experiments: writing Hungarian text in Hebrew letters and transcribing certain ancient poetic forms into German, following the example of Pope Urban VIII. We only knew of these attempts, but the sources themselves were not available until now. I examine in detail Klesch's now discovered Latin and German Alcaic and Pindaric odes, and compare them with contemporary German poetic practice. Placing Klesch's statements and texts in this dimension, it is clear that our author was breaking new ground, since he was not joining an already existing German-language practice, but was seeking to give voice to the Latin metrics of Pope Urban VIII and, through them, to the ancient tradition in German. Klesch also sent Lambeck a Hungarian poem in one of his prints, transcribed in Hebrew letters. This is a curiosity in Hungarian cultural history, which cannot be found in Hungarian literature of the 17th century, and I will therefore deal with this text and its linguistic background in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The works of Milutin Milanković, mathematician, astronomer and climatologist, which, for the uninitiated, carry enigmatic titles and speak of thermal phenomena and solar radiation, would have had little chance to attract the attention of literary critics, if among them one had not found some popular science works intended for the general public. One of them, titled Kroz vasionu i vekove (Across the Universe and Centuries) from 1928, a popular epistolary novel, reveals the author's French readings fairly quickly. The influence of the 17th century French author Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and his book Interviews on the Plurality of Worlds from 1686 seems obvious, however neither scientists nor literary historians say much about it. The subject of this paper is comparative analysis of these two books, which use similar writing strategies, exploring border areas between 17th and 20th century science and fiction. Our objectives are to place the mentioned works in the scientific and cultural context of the respective periods. Furthermore we want to take a new look at literary texts with a strong scientific content and analyze the phenomenon of popularization of science, as well as highlight often unknown relationships between literature and science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present paper is to reveal how Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000), the well-known English writer, employs defamiliarization device in her second novel The Bookshop (1978). Penelope Fitzgerald is mainly known for her distinctive and elegant style, called by many critics the "quiet genius" of the late twentieth-century English fiction. She can also be called the master of the uncanny, or ostranenie (making it strange), as the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky defined it. Penelope Fitzgerald brings quite new and original interpretations to the familiar concepts like morality, courage, kindness, help and hope. Through the literary concept of defamiliarization, the reader gains a new awareness of these issues. In her novels, essays, reviews and letters, she surprises the reader by defamiliarizing these well-known notions, loading them with new meaning and surprising the reader with the newly discovered truths which had always been there unnoticed by readers. By doing so, Penelope Fitzgerald's aim is far from lifting the readers' hearts. On the contrary, she tries to draw their attention to the life without any illusions, life "as it really is.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the ways in which some eighteenth-century English novelists simultaneously endorsed and challenged the narrative conventions of realism, by recourse to the epistolary technique and to a choice of narrators and narrative situations that conformed to the conventions of ‘domestic fiction’ and by resorting to irony and intertextual parody, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manuscript Intervention as Self-Care The previous sections have established that Trench's printed works doubly inhabit the genre of the letter and the means through which Trench leverages the materiality of the codex to give her recipient/readers embodied "reading lessons." Of Trench's printed poetry, one scholar notes, "As a result of these wildly varying editions and contradictory dates of publication, it is very difficult to make any statements about Trench's growth as a poet after the year 1800."[45] Perhaps the problem is not Trench, but that we have been asking the wrong questions of Trench and her poetry. Consider three copies of the first page of Melesina Trench's poem "On the Loss of Elizabeth Melesina Trench, an Only Daughter, In her fifth year" with marginalia in the hand of the author (figures 1-3).[2] Even at a glance, their differences in content and location of marginalia are striking: an inscription at the head of the page, some organized around the poem's title, others footnoted below the printed text. This essay will identify the function of Trench's inscribed copies as epistolary exchange, show how these intermedial texts make embodied demands of their readers, and then return to the "On the Loss" poem to illustrate what we learn when we apply this method of reading Trench's poetry. [Extracted from the article]

The purpose of this paper is to socialize a didactic experience of production of the academic book review genre with students of graduation in Letters, highlighting the abilities and language operations put into operation by the students during activities of writing and rewriting. The theoretical-methodological contributions of Sociodiscursive Interactionism associated to the approach of the Academic Literacies lead our reflections on socio-communicative and textual-discursive aspects of the academic book review and the process of didatization accomplished. The data were generated in qualitativeinterpretative action research, through the conduction of activities with the genre that culminated in the production of book reviews by the students. In the evaluation of the texts, we observed that the changes towards gender appropriation occurred more intensively at the level of discursive and linguistic-discursive capacities, which, in the materiality of the text, reveal issues related to social roles and identities that are built in the experience with academic writing and the knowledge of a certain disciplinary field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zosimus' Epistula 7 (JK 333 = J3 739, Quid de Proculi) to Patroclus, bishop of Arles, would suggest the normal operations of ecclesiastical judicial procedures: Proclus had been condemned, the validity of an earlier synodal decision had been overturned, and Patroclus' own authority had been upheld. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Other letters in Liber auctoritatem ecclesiae Arelatensis , particularly three written by Zosimus also in September 417, inform us about just how controversial were not only Patroclus' claims to authority in southern Gaul but Zosimus' support of Patroclus and his assertion that the Roman church had a role in arbitrating these claims. The evidence in the collection is of a dispute conducted with anything but diplomacy. This paper sets Quid de Proculi in its broader context to reveal how both Zosimus and the church of Arles tried, unwittingly or not, to promote a false memory about the church of Arles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two 1997 epistolary novels, To a Young Woman and Going Solo, by late Ugandan author Hope Keshubi, which offer a programmatic reading of Uganda's contemporary problems. Keshubi's primary agenda in these novels is to promote dialogue on the following social and political issues concerning women: sexual health, sexual maturation, domestic violence (wife battery and paternal abuse), subjugating traditions, discriminatory inheritance laws, and social relations between mistress and wife. This paper examines how Keshubi deftly works against patriarchal constraints on speech and actions, which have real and harmful consequences on the lives of Ugandan girls and women. Keshubi's texts show women they can triumph over discrimination and taboos, surviving physically and psychologically in the Uganda of the 1990s. This paper examines current denigrating literary reception of Ugandan women authors and asks why Keshubi did not experience demeaning reception a decade prior. In Keshubi's works, it is the private act of a female narrator writing to a female addressee that constitutes agency and her contribution to society, keenly shown in To a Young Woman and Going Solo, provides a new social vision of emotional transformation through prior unimagined dialogues. This paper presents hereto-unknown information about Hope Keshubi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asian American novelist Ruth Ozeki's 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being presents a dual narrative of Japanese schoolgirl Nao, and fictional author Ruth. Ozeki problematises the schoolgirl image by embracing and subverting the stereotypical tropes of the Japanese schoolgirl through her exploration of the practice of "compensated dating" known as "enjo kōsai." This paper examines how a novel intended for a Western audience depicts the iconic Japanese schoolgirl, specifically with reference to the practice of enjo kōsai, which allows an exploration of the gendered and cultural influences apparent in Ozeki's writing of the schoolgirl persona while also challenging the ideas of enjo kōsai that are often found in the media. A Tale for the Time Being presents two contradictory representations of this phenomenon which cyclically grip both the Japanese and international media outlets in a collective "moral panic": that of the innocent schoolgirl led astray into a world of sexual deviancy, and that of the subversive schoolgirl who deploys her limited resources to her advantage. By utilising an epistolary narrative style, the Japanese schoolgirl Nao presents a critique of the media's portrayal of enjo kōsai, while also exploring issues of the hybridity of self and Japanese girlhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to historically contextualize and analyze the birth and early development of the concept of countertransference, introduced by Sigmund Freud in 1909. In order to do so, scientific publications will be considered, as well as the epistolary and the historical information about the personal relationship between Freud and his students, and among his students and some of their colleagues and patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the construction of Manoil, the eponymous hero of Dimitrie Bolintineanu's novel, in relation to: a number of European fictional models present in the 19th century in the 'very young' Romanian literature; to the non-competitive rapport between the realist and romanticist conventions of the time in point of character authenticity/ verisimilitude, and also to the narrative strategies which include the diary, the epistolary novel and timid attempts at introspection. Set within the framework of the narrative structures of the sentimental epistolary novel, Bolintineanu's character is constructed so as to illustrate the moralizing theme which holds that the representation of femininity may acquire both positive and negative connotations (and functions), intervening in the male character's inner and outer journey as a destructive or, on the contrary, re-constructive force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The letters we discuss are published in Anton Golopentia, The Epistolary Rhapsody, volume IV. As an editor of the series (amounting to a total of 1.958 letters found in A.G.'s personal papers), I opted for publishing both the 689 letters written by A.G. and the 1.269 letters that were addressed to him, and regrouping the letters in 280 letter exchanges. In the present article, I examine three letter exchanges: between A.G. and Emil-George Papahagi, who are 19 respectively 20 years-old at the beginning of their correspondence; between A.G. and Mihai Parpala, freshly graduates of the Bucharest Faculty of Law, and between A.G., who is a Rockefeller grantee and his young professor Tudor Vianu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary literature seems to have reconciled the idea that everything valuable has already been said and done and, as such, has wilfully inscribed itself in a never-ending cycle of narratives about narratives, in a process of recycling and updating the past, which some love to name postmodernist. What is left at stake is simply the consumerist need to produce an oxymoronic 'original copy': to launch that piece of literature unseen and unheard of before on a crowded book market. A recipe for success seems to be the ability to combine the novelty of the architectural design - the formal innovation - with the thematisation of the present. It is precisely what the young Welsh novelist and scriptwriter, David Llewellyn, achieves with his debut novel, Eleven. In an attempt to translate the old into the new, Eleven is constructed following the design of the early modern epistolary novels, yet making use of a contemporary mode of writing: the email. Thematically, it is an exploration of patterns of individual thinking shaped by the media, against the background of an event with global consequences, which is, nevertheless, viewed from afar, without the inherent trauma so visible in American post-9/11 fiction. The present paper aims at analysing the construction of the novel, including the linguistic transformations it employs, and at accounting for the identitary revolt that transpires from the e-mails exchanged between various character-narrators on an apparently ordinary day: September 11, 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to account for the 'historicity of emotions' by reading and commenting two letters by the German nun Hildegard of Bingen as examples of 12th century epistolary monastic writing. The first letter, written in 1151, was addressed to the young nun Richardis of Staden. The second one, written in 1175, was Hildegard's answer to the young monk Guibert of Gembloux concerning the nature of her visions. In the commentary of these texts, addressed not only to their nominal addressees, but also to a wider monastic community, I explore the specific emotions which Hildegard elaborated and expressed in writing. It is important to acknowledge that today's reading of these letters is determined by perspectives which widely differ from their medieval reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the author's experience editing a collection of letters addressed to an Englishwoman named Lady Lydia Clerke, known as "The Lydia Clerke Collection." She draws on her experience of writing her 2006 book "The Lives and Letters of an Eighteenth-Century Circle of Acquaintance." Issues discussed include questions of footnoting and choosing which letters to include in published editions of letters. The author draws on epistolary novel theory and examines a paper called "Editing the Letters of Letter Writers" by Robert Halsband, delivered at the English Institute at Columbia University in September of 1956.

The present paper explores the status of the epistle in Antiquity, trying at the same time to circumscribe some of the fundamental attitudes towards the letter and letter-writing, as well as recurrent themes and motifs. The article is focused on the letter collection of the Athenian philosopher, Alciphron, and Ovid's Epistulae Heroidum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research hypothesis is that the semantism of confinement comes to the surface in the web of our corpus --the contemporary political prisoners discourse and the Acts of the martyrs from the beginning of Christianity- by means of bundles of sense which have characteristics in common and generates either implicit or explicit speech marks which refer to confinement as a specific manner of institutional violence. At the same time, those marks crystallize in the body of the prisoner and tortured women. The main objective of the paper is to carry out a semiotic and comparative analysis of epistolary documents in clearly defined historical and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpretive impasses are part and parcel of Pauline studies. This essay examines scholarly stalemates resulting from learned readings of Paul's instructions to the Thessalonians regarding sexual purity, work and grief in I Thess. 4.4, 11 and 13 respectively. Furthermore, this article observes the exegetical moves that interpreters make in treating these texts. The fact that specialists of I Thessalonians draw decidedly different conclusions as to the meaning of Paul's instructions to his converts regarding marrying, laboring and mourning highlights the importance of the following issues in Pauline interpretation: (1) authorial intent; (2) cultural and contextual influences upon both the author and the audience; and (3) textual parallels. I conclude this paper by playing my own interpretive hand on the verses under discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper originates from a clear consideration of epistolary writing as a gnoseologic space stemming from the relation between Ricardo palma and Miguel de Unamuno, from 1903 to 1913. Thus it is inscribed, at the same time, in the field of cultural relations between Spain and the Americas. As a consequence, our main aim does not require an intratextual approach only, but an intertextual one of Palma's and Unamuno's works, in those texts where they meet, either as prologues, comments or simply epistolary exchange. In this frame, we read a series of problems dealing with history, literature, and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]