Wortham, S.;
(2025)
Reading Robert Walser: Criticism, creativity, correspondence.
[Book].
UCL Press: London.
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Abstract
Reading Robert Walser concentrates on the letters sent by the author Robert Walser to Frieda Mermet, the laundry manager at a Swiss psychiatric hospital where his sister worked as a teacher. Their exchange continued from 1913 to 1942, covering the time when Walser’s literary fortunes declined, after which he himself was placed in an asylum for almost three decades before his death in 1956. This epistolary history provides a reflection on the question of correspondence and literature, particularly the subject of lost correspondence, gender, the question of address and the performance of identity. Simon Wortham frames the letters with an extensive critical biography about the life and writing of Robert Walser, whose work has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. As her side of the exchange no longer survives, the book concludes with a fictional reimagining of Mermet’s response to Walser’s letters. This creative part is carefully introduced by chapters on epistolary writing in a range of critical settings from modernism to literary theory and deconstruction, as well as exploring what is at stake in creative engagements with a literary legacy of this kind.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Reading Robert Walser: Criticism, creativity, correspondence |
| ISBN-13: | 9781800088252 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781800088252 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088252 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Text © Author, 2025 Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. This licence allows you to share and adapt the work for non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information: Wortham, S. 2025. Reading Robert Walser: Criticism, creativity, correspondence. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088252 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ |
| Keywords: | Robert Walser, Elfriede Jelinek, Franz Kafka, Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida, literary theory, literary correspondence, twentieth-century literature; literary criticism |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10207095 |
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