Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–1850

by Thomas O. Beebee

• ISBN13: 9780521025089
• ISBN10: 0521025087
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Thomas O. Beebee offers a history of epistolary fiction as a major phenomenon practiced across Europe from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. He shows how epistolary fiction appropriated the status and power the letter had already acquired, and goes on to explore a number of related discourses and themes, including the letter writing manual, self-referential aspects of the letter, news and travel reporting, the relationship between letters and gender, and historically-specific letter writing by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors including Austen, Balzac, and Dostoevsky. There is a bibliography of major European epistolary fiction to 1850.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: letters, genealogy, power

2. Ars dictaminis: the letter-writer in the machine

3. Self-reflexive letters

4. Epistolary defamiliarization

5. The lettered woman as dialectical image

6. A revolution in letters

7. The ghost of epistolarity in the nineteenth-century novel

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index.