Prof. Dr. Monika Fludernik (Freiburg University): “The Letter and the Novel”

Tuesday, May 18, 2026, 12:15 - 1:45 p.m., U5/00.24 (An der Universität 5)

The lecture will first of all focus on the relationship between letters and novels, especially on the two main categories, i.e. letters included in novels (prose fiction) and the epistolary novel. A comparison between real/historical letters in the late medieval/early modern period with letters as they appear in prose fiction will be followed by an analysis of how letters in (proto-)novels are handled and how the literary genre of epistolary fiction develops in Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister. The main intention is to show up how literary uses of letter-writing inaugurate functions of epistolary exchange that are not possible in real letters.

MONIKA FLUDERNIK is Professor emerita in English Literature at the University of Freiburg. Her major research interests include narratology, linguistic approaches to literature, especially metaphor studies, 'Law and Literature', postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century aesthetics. She is the author of, among others, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (Routledge, 1993), the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (Routledge, 1996), Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Developments in Narrative Structure: From the Thirteenth Century to the Rise of the Novel (Routledge, 2025). She has (co-)edited over thirty volumes of essays and special issues. In 2024, Fludernik was awarded the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea and the American Philosophical Society.