The Letters in the Story

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

Letters in the Novel and the Novel in Letters

This chapter argues that Henry Mackenzie’s novel in letters Julia de Roubigné marks a transition from epistolary novels that are characterized by numerous correspondents who betray a desperate need for response to nineteenth-century frame tales that unite multiple speakers and eager listeners. Predicting the continued force of epistolary affect and perspective in novels published well into the nineteenth century, Julia de Roubigné indicates the role that fictional scenes of sympathetic response play in the historical transition from the novel in letters to the letter in the novel. This function of sympathy points to the persistent significance of the emotional immediacy and multiple perspectives that are characteristic of a logic of epistolarity, which in turn guides the shifting speakers and listeners of retrospective frame tales, such as René, Frankenstein, and Wuthering Heights, discussed in later chapters.

The Novel of Sensibility in the 1780s

This chapter studies the novels of sensibility in the 1780s. The philosophy of John Locke, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson had influenced the first wave of epistolary novels of sensibility beginning in the 1740s. These explored the interaction between emotion and reason in producing moral actions. Response to stimuli was minutely examined, especially the relationship between the psychological and physiological manifestations of feelings. Later in the century, and, in particular during the late 1780s when the novel enjoyed a surge in popularity, the capacity for fine feeling became increasingly valued for its own sake rather than moralized. Ultimately, sensibility should be seen as a long-lasting literary movement rather than an ephemeral fashion. It put paternal authority and conventional modes of masculinity under question.

Epistolography

This chapter examines the genre of epistolography, which flourished and proliferated in the variety of its forms and uses in the Empire. The epistolary genre in the Second Sophistic is first briefly situated within rhetorical theory and practice, then contextualized within both earlier Greek literature and developments in Latin letters. The variety of Greek literary uses of the letter form in the Second Sophistic is then illustrated with a series of subgenres and examples. Surveyed are collections of fictional and pseudonymous letters (including Aelian, Alciphron, Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana), epistolary novels (Chion of Heraclea, Themistocles), shorter narratives in letter form, and letters embedded in longer narratives (including the Greek novels and Lucian’s Verae Historiae).

Den sentimentala romanen och kampen om medborgarskap: Rousseaus Julie och Staëls Delphine

<p>The sentimental novel and the struggle for citizenship: Rousseau&rsquo;s <em>Julie </em>and Sta&euml;l&rsquo;s<em> Delphine</em></p><p>The tragic fates of a great number of women in sentimental novels of the eighteenth century can be viewed against the background of classic liberal theory. They provide examples of how individual freedom and restraint in the name of common good can be reconciled. Faced with the impossible choice between a life guided by the principle of love and that of virtue, women often choose self-sacrifice as a means of preserving a sense of individuality in the face of the demands of public universality. The epistolary novels, <em>Julie ou La Nouvelle H&eacute;lo&iuml;se </em>(1761) of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the <em>Delphine </em>(1802) of Germaine de Sta&euml;l, present two rather different treatments of this problem. Rousseau&rsquo;s Julie is a woman whose unquenchable desire transforms her into a prototype of female unreliability not worthy of societal recognition. Sta&euml;l&rsquo;s Delphine, in turn, unmasks a ruthless and unprincipled society which prohibits her from becoming its full-fledged member.</p>

Samuel Richardsons brevromaner

En litteraturhistorisk placering The Epistolary Novels of Samuel Richardson: Reconsidering the Historical PerspectiveThe epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson were received with enthusiasm throughout Britain and Europe upon their publication in the 1740s and 50s, and they have had their unquestioned place in the literary canon and the literary history of the 18th century, as well as in the many rivalling Rise of the Novel narratives, ever since. The qualities of Richardson’s novels praised by contemporary reading audiences and professional critics were to some extent the qualities we still acknowledge in the the works. And yet I propose to reconsider and modify our ‘historical’ understanding of Richardson’s novels. Richardson scholars from the 1970s onward have deepened our understanding of the contexts of Richardson’s life and writing, and they have shown to what extent both the style, the form, the motifs, and the themes of his novels must be placed alongside the works of rival authors, today much less known, and the comedies and tragedies of the restoration period, just to mention two important fields of inspiration for Richardson. On the basis of their findings we must conclude that the novels we read today when considering Richardson’s works as part of a formal literary history are not quite the same as the novels contemporary readers cherished. There are important differences as well as correspondences between the contemporary reception of Richardson’s works and the reception of professional scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.