Epistolary fictions in the Republic of Letters: Gender, genre, and print culture

As one of the significant forms of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters, the epistolary novel was part of the eighteenth-century organization of human experience into categories of public and private, a revised social order that was accommodated by political theories of the public sphere and the technological developments of print culture. Writing at the paradoxical crossroads of public and private, epistolary authors used the genre to formulate very different responses to a new cultural anxiety about private energies and appetites, particularly those of women, and to legitimate their own authorial practices.;Examining the genre's ideological functions clarifies the intimate connections between epistolary fictions of sociopolitical critique, such as Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), and "sentimental" letter-novels, preoccupied with the thematic material of love, sex, and the family, on the model of Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48). Riccoboni's Fanni Butlerd (1757) appropriates aspects of both these types, removing the epistolary tradition from the hermetic privacy of the convent and boudoir and explicitly relocating it in the Enlightenment public sphere. This study of eighteenth-century epistolary narrative as the site of the intersection and differentiation of public and private also suggests how, within the academy and elsewhere, these Enlightenment categories continue to participate in the cultural construction of gender and authority today.