LIT6021   Exchanging Letters: Art and Correspondence in Twentieth-Century American Culture   (30 credits)

Description

This module looks at the art and practice of letter writing in twentieth-century American literature. In particular, it considers the relationship between letter writing and other literary genres, investigating the use writers make of their own and other people's correspondence in published novels, poems and stories. Students will read letters by some of the twentieth-century's most controversial and innovative epistolary writers, including Elizabeth Bishop, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Flannery O'Connor and Sylvia Plath. One of the main aims of the module will be to consider the aesthetics of letter writing and the extent to which it might be seen as a literary genre in its own right. In addition to this, you will be expected to show awareness of the different historical and social contexts in which these artists worked and to contextualise their readings of letters through reference to other biographical and literary sources

Reading List