e2 A novel: e2 A Novel: Traditional and New Epistolarity: Re-shaping a Genre by Re-mediating Electronic Tools

Electronic and digital devices have changed ordinary communication as much as modified literary discourse. Since the mid-90s, people have gradually relied on emails, while to rethink the creative process writers have used the Internet and exploited or imported Internet communications in their writings. All sorts of contaminations have generated yet more hybrid narratives as authors re-mediated discourse patterns in an attempt to re-present and capture a new highly mediated reality. Given its revolutionary character, not surprisingly, the epistolary novel has been the subject of a revival with 20th- and 21stcentury works classified as such in a diverse production57. The increasing variety of such literary production has triggered an investigation on the impact of the electronic tools and digital media on contemporary electronic-mail novels, i.e. e-novels. Thus, I decided to concentrate my attention on a noteworthy specimen of e-pistolarity, e2 A novel (2010) by British novelist Matt Beaumont. With its striking visual impact and similarly extravagant collection of layouts, in e2 A novel, emails and other ecorrespondences re-model the plot development, reshape communicative practice and hence remediate literary discourse. Five major aspects re-fashion the genre in Beaumont: a new topic; a set of different text typologies, their distinctive linguistic functions and features; an altered understanding of time and space; new and enhanced pragmatics between correspondents; and a rethinking of the writer/reader relationship chiselled in a minimal set of typographic elements and an essential if crucial framed narrative.