Epistolary encounters in neo-Victorian fiction: diaries and letters

Epistolary strategies play a central role in the contemporary imagination that rewrites Victorian culture. Neo-Victorian writers invoke conflicting viewpoints in diaries, letters, and other addressed accounts to creatively retrace the past in fragmentary, incomplete, and contradictory ways. Epistolary practices intensify neo-Victorian concerns with processes of fragmentation, as interrupted and riddling messages disrupt rather than illuminate communication between past and present. This book provides detailed analyses of writerly strategies that readdress and redeliver the Victorians to us with the promise of epistolary secrets. Yet in contrast to the nineteenth-century fiction that embeds documents to expose and explain secrets, embedded documents in neo-Victorian fiction contrive to deconstruct how investigatory reading and interpretation take place. Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Diaries and Letters explores the complex writerly and readerly desires implicated in epistolary discoveries of 'hidden' Victorians and offers new insight into the creative synthesising of critical perspectives within the neo-Victorian novel.