A communicative approach to the epistolary form in letters of Victorian women writers

grantor: University of TorontoAlthough the letter has long been valued as an object of material culture, as an autobiographical text, and as a means of communication, literary critics have paid the epistolary form itself little attention. My study, therefore, describes the form as it is found in letters by Victorian women writers. It is based on an extensive collection of unpublished letters, supplemented by published editions, of approximately thirty-five British and American women writers during the 1820s-1870s. In formulating my approach, I have drawn on sociological, psychological, linguistic, and literary theory, particularly rhetoric, formalism, literary stylistics, and discourse analysis. My study demonstrates how careful analysis of the epistolary components leads to more accurate interpretations of letters and hence to an increased understanding of the lives and contexts of their authors. The study begins by examining how critical assumptions derive from epistolography with its emphasis on taxonomy and rhetoric. Although the basis for these assumptions is often sound, categorical statements obscure rather than clarify the paradoxical characteristics that delineate the form's parameters. Next, the specifically epistolary components of a letter text are examined; then the epistolary "body" is discussed in its physical aspects and in its construction by the topics. The letter's specific components, its physicality, and the topics are linked as structural components and they influence, and are influenced by, the responsive process of recognition, recollection, and requital. Epistolary discourse is constructed both as a response to an interactional situation and as an invitation to future interaction. In the final chapter, the role of friendship in synthesizing the discourse's pragmatic and creative aims is examined. With an increased understanding of the form's structure, aims, and rhetorical strategies, the letter emerges as a highly complex text. The letter cannot be adequately understood as a closed text without a complete text because the parts function together to construct its meaning. As an open text, a unit of a correspondence, the letter needs to be viewed intertextually because epistolary meaning is dialogical. Though the study is not primarily biographical or sociological, its material provides evidence pertinent to such studies of Victorian women authors.Ph.D