Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500-1850

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.