THE SHORT FORM RESHAPED: EMAIL, BLOG, SMS, AND MSN IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY E-PISTOLARY NOVELS

Brevity in literature is a complex issue: “short stories are short in various ways and for various reasons” (Friedman 1994, 18). Telling a short story or telling a story through a collection of short texts are two quite distinct narrative practices, both in designing and writing fiction. Nonetheless, the genre of the short story and that of epistolary fiction share a hybrid nature, a “power to combine richness with concision” (Shaw 1983, 11), a control over the reader, an inclination for spoken forms, and “the tension between closural and anticlosural features” (Lohafer 1994, 301). “Seen as a form which arouses a feeling of wonder at finding so much expressed within such narrow boundaries, the short story is an intrinsically witty genre which has affinities with a wide range of artistic strategies for compressing meaning” (Shaw 1983, 11). Twenty-first century e-pistolary novels in book form make the picture even more complex as they are works of fiction of varied lengths, displaying and combining various types of digital and electronic short forms enabled by technological innovation, which started in the mid-90s. Brevity for these collections of e-texts is as much a trait as a technical constraint. Before moving any further, the spelling of epistolarity with a hyphen, i.e. e-pistolarity or e-pistolary novels, is worth a digression. It is a choice intended to highlight the difference between the traditional epistolary genre—a fiction partly or entirely based on a typical paper-based exchange between two or more correspondents—and literary works that consider new forms, modes, and channels of exchange. The novels discussed in this work rely only on text typologies (e-texts) produced by means of new technologies and new means of communication, such as email both via PC and/or mobile phone, texting via mobile phone (SMS), chat services via PC first (MSN) and later via mobile, eBay entries, excerpts from forums and blogs, or online papers and magazines.