Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500-1850

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Cambridge University Press, Mar 28, 1999 - Literary Criticism - 277 pages
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.

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Contents

the letterwriter in the machine
18
Selfreflexive letters
48
18
58
48
74
The lettered woman as dialectical image
117
A revolution in letters
137
The ghost of epistolarity in the nineteenthcentury novel
166
Postscript
199
Index
267
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