Epistolary novel Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook

Critical Essay by Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook

SOURCE: “The End of Epistolarity: ‘Letters from an American Farmer,’” in Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters, Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 140-72.

In the following excerpt, Cook contends that J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer laments the ending of the epistolary genre as it records life and customs in the newly independent United States.

What the Lettres persanes has been for scholars of European Enlightenment, [J. Hector St. John de] Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) has been for American studies: a generic anomaly that generates ongoing intradisciplinary contestation. The terrain of the debate is familiar: while the book deploys some of the narrative techniques of conventional prose fiction, it is composed of a series of letters that provide cultural and natural-historical information about the American setting and events, to which plot and character development are subordinated. As...
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