Epistolary Novel

The epistolary novel is a novel built as a correspondence between characters (or as a diary, or a collection of documents), in which there is no single omniscient narrator; events and characters are revealed through the voices of the heroes themselves. The form produces an effect of immediacy and intimate truthfulness, allowing a single event to be shown from different points of view. The genre was enormously popular in the eighteenth century: Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons, and Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. Later, epistolary devices were used in modernism and postmodernism. In Ukrainian literature the letter-form is vividly present in the epistolary heritage and in the novel-in-letters that was widespread in the sentimentalist and early-realist prose of the nineteenth century.