Modernist letters: the epistolary selves of Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett

This thesis analyses the letters of Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett, arguing that their literary work was not only fuelled by epistolary dialogue but sometimes took place within it. I challenge ideas of authorial and textual autonomy, tracing them back to Flaubert’s principle of impersonality and its theoretical development in New Criticism, before arguing against the conventional characterisation of Joyce and Beckett as impersonal writers. I examine how the self is written in letters, identifying three salient characteristics: multiplicity, relationality, and materiality. I argue that Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett’s experiences of writing and reading letters informed the way in which they represented self and subjectivity in their other texts. From Joyce’s epistolary corpus, I focus on his letters to his brother Stanislaus written from Rome in 1906 to 1907, looking at how the prevalence of financial and material detail shape his self-formative narratives. My discussion of Finnegans Wake focuses on Joyce’s extended pattern of allusions to Jonathan Swift’s letters to Rebecca Dingley and Esther Johnson (known as the Journal to Stella), using this intertextual link to illuminate the Wake’s wider epistolary theme. As part of my argument that letters should be treated as a literary text in their own right, I give a genetic analysis of one of Beckett’s letters to Pamela Mitchell, written in November 1953. By analysing Beckett’s process of revision from draft to final version, I interrogate the generic association of letters with spontaneity and unmediated self�expression. The final part of the thesis gives a close reading of Beckett’s letters to Barbara Bray written between 1956 and 1961. I show how Beckett reflects on the connection between dialogue and relational self-formation, themes which he then dramatizes in Happy Days