Epistolary Novels and Literary Postmodernity: L’Espérance de beaux voyages by Yves Navarre

Abstract

 Yves Navarre’s oeuvre is one of the greatest representatives of the use of epistolary material in French postmodern literature. L’Espérance de beaux voyages (1984) is his only epistolary novel, exclusively composed of letters. The present article aims to analyse how the author creates a roman épistolaire indécidable in which the letter materialises the different elements of literary postmodernity –renarrativization, discontinuity and hypertextuality– until reaching its saturation. Thus, Navarre generates an experience of the epistolary genre in which the diversel postmoderne arises from the transformation of fiction and autofiction into an auto/alter-fiction that allows to explore the writing alterity.