San Antonio College Library

Critic Malcolm Bradbury collects here all the letters he's ever wanted to write. From love letters and fan letters to letters to the famous dead, they all remain unsent but, the author argues, are none the less real for that.

Basically, [Barth] takes several people from his early novels and has them all starting to write to each other, and to him, their letters and experiences directing the plot. And what starts out as what could be a too-cute literary trick winds up being extremely revealing, as the characters pour themselves into the letters, regardless of whom they're writing to, as the plot skips and slips through time. On one level it acts as a sequel to those early...

"This book offers a comprehensive look at the use of imaginary letters in Greek literature from Homer to Philostratus. By imaginary letters, it means letters written in the voice of another, and either inserted into a narrative (epic, historiography, tragedy, the novel), or comprising a free-standing collection (e.g. the Greek love letter collections of the Imperial Roman period). The book challenges the notion that Ovid "invented" the fictional letter...