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Five Holiday Letters: A Fiction

University of Idaho

Moved by a desire to evoke in readers some possibilities for subjective meaning and emotional experiences available in reading personal correspondence, the author offers a set of five fictional holiday letters. The decision to use fiction is justified by recourse to current scholarship on nontraditional narratives in qualitative research. The author further discusses the grounds for this fictional presentation of research results by explaining his ambition to share his understanding of the structural properties of the holiday letters epistolary genre and its situated writers, which he acquired in earlier, more traditional qualitative studies, without minimizing the gains of fiction writing. More central to the purposes of this effort is his desire to create a unique character who gives voice to particular human struggles and values at the juncture of the modern and postmodern experience: Ginny Balfour is inspired by specific women letter writers but is a construction of his imagination.

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