Epistolary Culture in the English Restoration

The present research project will add to our understanding of literary culture at this particular point in time, and it will do so with a specific focus at the role played by epistolary culture. The various publications to come out of this project will jointly address the status of epistolarity in early-modern British literary culture and will demonstrate that the form of the letter contributed substantially to the introduction of new literary forms. The specific media context of epistolary writing allowed writers to challenge the supposed veracity of mediated communication and simultaneously to alert readers to the increasing importance of becoming knowledgeable about the dynamics and potential of print culture, both in a positive and in a critical sense.

Contrary to the widely held consensus that the letter added to the early novel a modicum of reliability and enabled writers to represent their characters’ interiority in more nuanced manners, recent scholarship on forms of epistolary writing has stressed the form’s deconstructive potential, discussed the subversive element that the medium of the letter introduced to prose fiction, and stressed the importance of epistolary culture for the formation of how individuals related to their personal and socio-political environment. The changing media environment of the English Restoration age, benefitting as it did from a more liberal attitude towards censorship and progressive legislation about copyright, brought forth an unheard-of increase in literary culture, including the birth of periodical and newspaper publishing on a large scale. It is in this cultural environment, driven by a public sphere as staged in the coffee houses, that new forms of communications were tried out; and that the newly popularised form of the letter, both personal and in print, gained importance. The letter was seen as an easily available commodity, greatly supported by the recent establishment of the penny post; yet it was also understood to be a form of communication that was easily corrupted and hence habitually used for deceptive purposes. The very principle of deception turned into a major trope within Restoration and early eighteenth-century literary culture: there existed a general understanding within literary circles that the impersonality of epistolary communication lent itself perfectly to the kind of cultural criticism – criticism, that is, of the excessive Baroque culture that was clearly at odds with the lived experience of the non-courtly population – that found an outlet in this generic focus on the force of deception.

It is from this point of the current scholarly debate that the present project will take off and present Restoration epistolary culture as implicated in a discussion that was intimately tied to media criticism, new forms of corporeality, and changing literary values while remaining committed to investing into literary discourse as a means and platform of both aesthetic innovation and social critique. The research to come out of this project will show that epistolary culture contributed substantially to the shaping of early-modern English literary culture, doing so specifically by dint of its potential to toy with the medial status of letter writing and the concomitant engagement with matters of truth and veracity. The letter as a tool of literary forms of representations allowed both readers and writers to reflect on the mediated nature of writing; and it invited a form of reception that grew increasingly aware of the tenuous relationship between sign and reality. The larger implications of this realisation were tested out in how early modern literary culture attached to epistolary forms of communication a modicum of scepticism and a whiff of disrespect. Through studying early-modern epistolarity, we stand to gain a significantly better understanding of the history of realism and thus also of the generic developments within narrative prose fiction.

Gerd Bayer (PI)

Jaroslaw Jasenowski (doctoral researcher)

Editing Project “Short Fiction in Peter Motteux’s Gentleman’s Journal”

In collaboration with Prof Mariajosé Coperias (U Valencia), we are preparing for publication a modern and annotated edition of the short fictions that appeared in Motteux’s journal. The print book will also be available as open access file.

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Online Workshop on “Restoration Epistolarity”

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Erlangen, 26 March 2021

Conference Programme  (UPDATED 24 MARCH)

Session One

9.45-10.30        Prof. Dr. Helen Berry (Exeter): “Democracy’s Fatal Flaw: Anonymity and the Normalization of Offence in John Dunton’s Epistolary Periodicals”

Session Two

11.00-11.45      Prof. Dr. Florian Kläger (Bayreuth): “Sidereal Messengers: Epistolarity in Early Modern Astronomical Writing”

11.45-12.30      Prof. Dr. Joe D. Bray (Sheffield): “The Early Eighteenth-Century Letter and the Novel”

Session Three

14.00-14.45     Jaroslaw Jasenowski, MA (Erlangen): “Coffeehouse Curiosities: Materiality and Musealisation Strategies in the Athenian Mercury”

14.45-15.30     Prof. Dr. Thomas O. Beebee (Penn State): “All the News That’s Fit to Steal: Charles Gildon, Ferrante Pallavicino, and the Geopolitics of Rifled Mailbag Fiction”

Session Four

16.00-16.45     Prof. Dr. Gerd Bayer (Erlangen): “The Bishop of Exeter vs. Benjamin Hoadly: Pamphlets, Controversy, and the Uses of Epistolarity”

16.45-17.15     Roundtable & Wrap Up