Introduction


Bram Stoker wrote one of the most successful epistolary novels of all time: Dracula
Doogie Howser, M.D., would not have existed without the epistolary novel. When the improbably young medical practitioner typed his computer journal entries at the end of each episode, he was following a long tradition of epistolary writing. The word epistle means "letter," and early forms of epistolary storytelling (such as the fifteenth-century Spanish work Prison of Love) interspersed letters with traditional third-person narrative. Eventually, works employed the epistolary device exclusively. In monologic epistolary novels, the action is told from one character’s point of view. Dialogic epistolary writing tells its story through the back-and-forth correspondence of two characters. A polylogic approach represents the most complex employment of the epistle because it allows multiple characters to narrate the action of the story.

Essential Facts

  1. Early English female writer Aphra Behn wrote a highly complex epistolary saga, Love Letter Between a Nobleman and His Sister. The novel used the form to play with the reader’s sense of truth and reality.
  2. Following Behn’s example, the French classic Les Liaisons Dangereuses used epistles to track societal intrigue among decadent aristocrats.
  3. Classics such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters helped perpetuate epistolary storytelling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
  4. Alice Walker’s highly successful work The Color Purple employed an epistolary approach, fragments of which were included in the acclaimed 1985 film adaptation.
  5. Contemporary variations on epistolary writing include journals, emails, blogs, and chat rooms.