Jane Austen and the Fall and Rise of the Epistolary Novel
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21784693 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fang Li (0000-0001-9180-3615, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies), Li Fang (0000-0003-1462-6357, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies), D Kellogg (0000-0001-6837-5501, New Testament Society of Korea) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 99-115 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistics and the Human Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1742-2906 • E-ISSN: 1743-1662 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/lhs-2024-0005 |
| OpenAlex | W4412128294 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 9 |
The epistolary novel, popular for just a few decades of the mid-18th century and out of favor by the early nineteenth, is making a counter-intuitive comeback in young adult fiction. In a recent study by the Smithsonian National Postal Museum of 138 epistolary novels from ancient Greece until the present day, 52 (37%) were published in the 21st century. Yet the actual writing of letters is not exactly undergoing a revival—even a romantic or personal email has something of the anachronistic about it. Here the fall and rise of this immersive and immediate form of novelistic discourse is traced through a quantitative re-analysis of the Postal Museum corpus, and a qualitative study using Halliday's systemic functional grammar to compare one epistolary novel in the corpus written in adolescence with a mature, non-epistolary novel by the same author: Jane Austen. We suggest that the very mimetic qualities that Jane Austen rejected can explain its predictable fall and apparently inexorable rise in adolescent literature
Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · History · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |