Old Friends, Essays in Epistolary Parody
What if Elizabeth Bennet corresponded with David Copperfield? What notes might pass between Mr. Pickwick and the Knight of the Burning Pestle? Andrew Lang imagined these impossible conversations in this deliciously nerdy collection of literary parodies. Drawing on his vast knowledge of fiction from Cervantes to Sir Walter Scott, Lang crafts fictional letters between characters who never met in their authors' original works. A dandy from one novel writes to a heroine of another; a villain schemes about characters he's never encountered; literary friends catch up across the boundaries of their separate stories. The joke is both affectionate and erudite, requiring readers to know their Victorian novels well enough to appreciate the absurdity. Lang plays with the conventions of epistolary fiction while paying tribute to the real magic of created characters - the peculiar ache of loving fictional people we can only visit, never truly know. It's a gentle spoof of literary obsession, written by a man who clearly suffered from it himself.
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