... Foster Hannah Webster Charles Brockden Brown epistolary writing letters epistolary novels courtship intimacy plotlessness Epistolary writing finds expression everywhere in Charles Brockden Brown’s work. His earliest-known fictional work, the unpublished “Henrietta Letters,” offers...

..., the decadent short story is distinguished by “excess in quintessence,” a paradox in which morbidity in its thematic and stylistic manifestations is enhanced by the delimiting nature of the form. This paradox makes the decadent short story “plotless,” static, and evanescent. Charlotte Mew’s “Passed” (1894), M...