Epistolary novel in the context of "Blog"

The Brethren of Purity, also known as The Brethren of Sincerity, were a secret society active during the reign of the Buyid dynasty.

Presumably composed of Muslim philosophers centered in the Buyid port city of Basra, the structure of the organization and the identities of its members have never been clear. Their esoteric teachings and philosophy are expounded in an epistolary style in the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity (Rasā'il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā'), a giant compendium of 52 epistles that would greatly influence later encyclopedias. A good deal of Muslim and Western scholarship has been spent on just pinning down the identities of the Brethren and the century in which they were active.

Julie or the New Heloise (French: Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse), originally entitled Lettres de Deux Amans, Habitans d'une petite Ville au pied des Alpes (Letters from two lovers, living in a small town at the foot of the Alps), is an epistolary novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published in 1761 by Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam. The novel's subtitle points to the history of Héloïse d'Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, a medieval story of passion and Christian renunciation.

Robinson Crusoe (/ˈkruːsoʊ/ KROO-soh) is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. It is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre, and has been described as the first novel, or at least the first English novel – although these labels are disputed.

Written with a combination of epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms, the book follows the title character (born Robinson Kreutznaer) after he is cast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" (now part of Chile) which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.

Narrative forms have been subject to classification by literary theorists, in particular during the 1950s, a period which has been described metaphorically as the Linnaean period in the study of narrative.

• Epistolary - a story usually in a letter written form with a section of dialogue

The Sorrows of Young Werther ([ˈveːɐ̯tɐ]; German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), or simply Werther, is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished Werther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works.

The novel was inspired by Goethe's personal life, and involving triangular relationships of real people. One triangular relationship involved Goethe, Christian Kestner, and Charlotte Buff (who married Kestner); and the other involved Goethe, Peter Anton Brentano, Maximiliane von La Roche (who married Brentano), and Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Jerusalem committed suicide on the night of Oct 29 or 30, 1772. He shot himself in the head with a pistol borrowed from Kestner. These events are fictionalized to describe the emotional tumult of the titular character Werther, who kills himself in despair after he falls in love with a woman engaged to another man.

The Book of Abramelin tells the story of an Egyptian mage named Abraham, or Abra-Melin, who taught a system of magic to Abraham of Worms, a Jew from Worms, Germany, presumed to have lived from c. 1362 to c. 1458. The system of magic from this book regained popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries, partly due to Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers's translation, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.

The book presents an autobiography written in the form of an epistolary novel. The character of Abraham of Worms narrates his travel to the Egyptian desert and to a town bordering the Nile. An elderly Egyptian mage offers him two manuscripts containing knowledge of Kabbalistic magic, but extracts an oath that bounds Abraham in the service of God and the divine law.

The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature is a 1789 American sentimental novel written in epistolary form by William Hill Brown and is widely considered to be the first American novel. The Power of Sympathy was Brown's first novel. The characters' struggles illustrate the dangers of seduction and the pitfalls of giving in to one's passions, while advocating the moral education of women and the use of rational thinking as ways to prevent the consequences of such actions.

The Nemesis of Faith is an epistolary philosophical novel by James Anthony Froude published in 1849. Partly autobiographical, the novel depicts the causes and consequences of a young priest's crisis of faith. Like many of his contemporaries, Froude came to question his Christian faith in light of early nineteenth century developments in history, theology, and science. Froude was particularly influenced by the Catholic teachings of the Oxford Movement and by the new approach to religious scholarship developed by the German Higher Critics.

The novel consists primarily of protagonist Markham Sutherland's account of the development of his religious ideas and doubts, followed by a brief narrative in which Sutherland's lack of faith leads him and his lover to tragic ends. The novel was condemned by English religious figures and publicly burned by William Sewell; this led to Froude's resignation of his fellowship at Oxford University.The novel's reception amongst literary reviewers was mixed; while writers such as George Eliot professed profound admiration, others such as Thomas Carlyle were harshly critical. Although no longer widely read as a literary work, it remains significant in intellectual history for its accounts of Victorian scepticism and the Oxford Movement.

A letter collection consists of a publication, usually a book, containing a compilation of letters written by a real person. Unlike an epistolary novel, a letter collection belongs to non-fiction literature. As a publication, a letter collection is distinct from an archive, which is a repository of original documents.

Usually, the original letters are written over the course of the lifetime of an important individual, noted either for their social position or their intellectual influence, and consist of messages to specific recipients. They might also be open letters intended for a broad audience. After these letters have served their original purpose, a letter collection gathers them to be republished as a group. Letter collections, as a form of life writing, serve a biographical purpose. They also typically select and organize the letters to serve an aesthetic or didactic aim, as in literary belles-lettres and religious epistles. The editor who chooses, organizes, and sometimes alters the letters plays a major role in the interpretation of the published collection. Letter collections have existed as a form of literature in most times and places where letter-writing played a prominent part of public life. Before the invention of printing, letter collections were recopied and circulated as manuscripts, like all literature.