Epistolary Responses

“Bower chooses an admirable variety of popular and literary epistolary novels to discuss. In separate chapters, Bower focuses on Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), John Barth’s LETTERS: A Novel (1979), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), John Updike’s S. (1988), Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs (1912), Upton Sinclair's Another Pamela, or Virtue Still Rewarded (1950), and Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986). . . . Overall, Bower provides an enlivening discussion about a form frequently and erroneously considered to be in its grave.”
—Modern Fiction Studies
 
“Bower relishes a good letter. Her charming introduction to this complex study of twentieth-century epistolary fiction captures the delight that readers, especially women, find in ‘bodied writing,’ in contrast with the e-mail and faxes that are rapidly replacing letters. Using a series of writers who have used letters as the formal basis of their novels, she explores the various voices and critical issues she discovers in each. The author has studied epistolary fiction and scholarship, considered her selections carefully, and even written to a number of authors and critics to elicit epistolary commentary on questions she poses…. The author’s fresh, lucid style and her sense of direct communication with her reader make this an unusually good piece of literary criticism for upper-division undergraduates through faculty.”
—Choice

“Bower provides an enlivening discussion about a form frequently and erroneously considered to be in its grave.”
—Modern Fiction Studies

"Anne Bower's Epistolary Responses adds to a growing body of work that validates alternatives to traditional discourse and narrative forms. Bower joins feminist critics in the endeavor to reclaim language and critical discourse and affirms all critics in the search for creative and accessible modes to write about literature. Epistolary Responses reveals the transformative power of writing and reading letters in literature and in life."—Olivia Frey, Saint Olaf College