LOST CAUSE LETTERS
LOST CAUSE LETTERS

An Epistolary Bridge between Two Great American Novels

Author(s): Anca Peiu
Subject(s): American Literature
Published by: Scientia Kiadó
Keywords: letters; distance; hunger; parties; in-between;
Summary/Abstract: Epistolary novel writing is a classic sort of metafiction. Letters are often (parts of) poems and plays, too. On the other hand, irony works as a means of self-defence within the (far from purely) literary text. In my essay, I will dwell upon two major modern American novels: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936). Though first published during the same year and referring to the same fratricidal Civil War (1861–1865), the two books could hardly be more different from each other, not only stylistically but also in point of their target audiences. If Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! represents a quintessence of his poetic prose, only addressing the most exclusive readership, Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind stands for (harsh) historical realism and the best of popular culture, consecrated by its eponymous period film version of 1939 – itself another traumatic year in world warfare history. And yet, despite all differences in approach and vision, these two books seem to find that privileged and paradoxical space in-between in their (even self-)subversive epistolary fragments. It is this in-betweenness that I am exploring here, from a double distance in time and space, i.e. from my early twenty-first century and from my Eastern European homeland.

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