From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 
Subject: RE: (urth) PEACE: sources for the Doris letter
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 13:39:10 -0700

Mantis done wrote...

> In addition to that epistlary context, we have oft noticed the Dickens
> mentions, so if we put these together we get a literary mode 
> as clear as Grimm's fairy tales and the Arabian Nights: a letter-story 
> ala Dickens, but set in Middle America in 1963 (which takes the Victorian 
> England out of the whole thing).
> 
> Did Wolfe have a specific Dickens episode in mind?

Ummm.

Granted, I've only read about half a dozen of Dickens's novels ... but
not a one of the ones I've read (OLIVER TWIST, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, 
DAVID COPPERFIELD, THE PICKWICK PAPERS -- okay, not really a novel -- 
A CHRISTMAS CAROL, and I'm pretty sure something else I'm forgetting)
was epistolary or even significantly driven by letters. 

Actually, when I think Victorian + epistolary novel the first thing
that comes to my mind is DRACULA. Which may or may not have anything
to do with PEACE. (Come to think of it, FRANKENSTEIN has an epistolary
frame, too.) This may or may not have anything to do with PEACE, a 
novel of a very different kind of Un-Dead.

--Blattid


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