"In the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, the read­ers of Europe went mad for epis­to­lary nov­els. France had, to name the most sen­sa­tion­al exam­ples, Mon­tesquieu's Let­tres per­sanes, Rousseau's Julie, and Lac­los' Les Liaisons dan­gereuses; Ger­many, Goethe's Die Lei­den des jun­gen Werther and Hölder­lin's Hype­r­i­on. The Eng­lish proved espe­cial­ly insa­tiable when it came to long-form sto­ries com­posed entire­ly out of let­ters: soon after its pub­li­ca­tion in 1740, Samuel Richard­son's Pamela - by some reck­on­ings, the first real Eng­lish nov­el - grew into an all-encom­pass­ing cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, which Richard­son him­self out­did eight years lat­er with Claris­sa."
"With the pos­si­ble excep­tions of Bram Stok­er's Drac­u­la (#104) and Mary Shel­ley's Franken­stein (#171) - two works of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry hor­ror that make use of a vari­ety of tex­tu­al forms, let­ters includ­ed - the rank­ings pro­duced by " The Big Read" includ­ed prac­ti­cal­ly no epis­to­lary nov­els. (Nor did eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry works of any oth­er kind make the cut.)"
Eighteenth-century readers across Europe avidly consumed epistolary novels, with landmark examples in France, Germany, and Britain. Long-form letter-novels like Pamela and Clarissa became cultural phenomena in England. A modern popularity survey omitted most eighteenth-century and epistolary works from its top rankings, with only later horror novels that used letters making marginal appearances. The disappearance of epistolary dominance coincided with the emergence of alternative narrative techniques that allowed stories to move beyond the limits of character-written letters, enabling richer, more varied novelistic forms.
Read at Open Culture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]