'This book, like the literary letters it examines, is intelligently attuned to the intimate to-and-fro between author and reader, in particular what happens when this dialogue takes place across fraught historical and political lines. Addressing why novelists from across the world returned to the epistolary form at the end of the long twentieth century, Bower closely analyses an impressive range of authors to show how and why words travel from I to you.'
- Dr Jonathan Ellis, Senior Lecturer, University of Sheffield, UK
'This lucid and original book explores the relationships between the epistolary novel, the world and postcolonial literature with a keen, critical eye and a nuanced concern for the material productions of texts, focusing on detailed readings as well as a wider global background. In doing so, Bower both reviews and reforms part of the field, and so this book should be read by those with an interest in the contemporary novel, postcolonialism and literary theory more generally.'
- Professor Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
By taking the epistle as its starting point and pursuing Auerbach's speculative ideal of weltliteratur, this book turns away from the dominant trend of 'distant reading' in world literature, and shows that it is in the close situated analysis of form and composition that the concept of world literature emerges most clearly. This study seeks to re-think the ways in which we read world literature and shows how the literary letter, in old and new forms, speaks powerfully again in this period.
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"Rachel Bower's Epistolarity and World Literature maintains a sustained focus on the resurgence of epistolary elements in recent Anglophone fiction. This turns out to be a remarkably productive methodological choice. ... The book is a masterful performance of comparative generosity, a generosity it shares with the some of the best world literature scholarship out there, or indeed with the cosmopolitan intellectual tradition the field updates." (Pieter Vermeulen, English Studies, November 27, 2018)