Epistolary Writings Research Articles

Margaret More Roper: A Survey of Her Writings

As a contribution to the forthcoming 500th anniversary of the publication of Margaret Roper (née More)’s A Devout Treatise (1524-2024), the purpose of this article is to make a survey of her written production (public and private), including those works that were preserved as well as those others that were written but have been lost. The trial and death of Thomas More necessarily resulted in the loss of documents and writings, not only by More but by his daughter too. Sixteenth-century biographies of Thomas More are the main source of information about his daughter Margaret (1505-1544) and her written production. These early biographers were clearly concerned with the promotion of the figure of More, but they did not let pass the opportunity to ponder and testify to the scholarly excellence of his eldest daughter. This is particularly the case of Nicholas Harpsfield (1557) and, more especially, Thomas Stapleton (1588). Cresacre More’s biography of More (Douai, 1631), even though in general terms it offers no original information, has also been used in this study. Another important corpus of information is the epistolary writings of Margaret and her father, as well as of Erasmus. Various other documents subject to recent literary criticism are also consulted.

Lonesome Female Character’s Art of Writing Epistles as An Escapism from Aloofness: An Examination of Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster and Dear Rachel Maddow by Adrienne Kisner

An epistle provides a trackway in bringing out the thoughts and emotions of a writer, wherein it helps the sender in conveying information and feelings and kindles the imaginations and sentiments of the receiver as well. An epistolary novel is one such literary work that makes use of messages that have been returned or electronically transmitted to support and enhance its story or exhibit the points of view and innermost feelings of the character(s). The focus of this paper is to showcase that female character(s) in isolation avail epistolary as a personification of a living creature, especially a partner or a friend. The objective of this work is to expose that women in novels take the aid of correspondences and modern communicative tools to break free the desertness and to share their experiences and dark secrets. It takes up two primary sources namely, Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster and Dear Rachel Maddow by Adrienne Kisner to justify its arguments and to attain its objectives. It provides a comparative study of the two select novels to unveil that women characters in novels from the past till date have been using some form of epistles as one of the techniques to get away from their lonely lives. The paper foregrounds itself on the theory of Psycho-Analytic Literary Criticism to support its statements of projecting that women in novels psychologically present themselves through epistolary writings.

СЕРГЕЙ ИВАНОВИЧ ТАНЕЕВ И ЮЛИЙ КОНЮС. УЧИТЕЛЬ И УЧЕНИК

The article is devoted to the unique creative contacts between the great Master S. I. Taneyev and his pupil Ju. E. Conus. The mentor played a special role in the formation of the artist’s personality. Memories and epistolary writings from as far back as a century and a half ago revealed the essence of the relationship between teachers and students. The focus of this publication is on the diaries of S. I. Taneyev and the letters of Ju. E. Conyus to his teacher. The role of such artefacts is difficult to overestimate. They are the most authentic testimonies of what happened and thus serve as a source of credibility. This epistolary heritage provides a new perspective on the personality of the great teacher, Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev. The interaction of the two musicians is unique in that it started in the Moscow Conservatory and continued many years after the graduation of Ju. Conus and Taneyev’s resignation as Director. Sergey Ivanovich kept diaries for only 16 years, but the information contained therein is unique. It formed the basis for the reconstruction of the biography of Ju. E. Conus as a violinist, composer and teacher. Besides, the genius of Jules Eduardovich, undeservedly neglected by modern scholars, is revealed through the prism of his creative interaction with the teacher.

Interconfessional Contacts and Conflicts in the Peloponnesos (Thirteenth to Fourteenth Century)

The purpose of this article is to analyze the features of interconfessional interaction of the Romaioi, Franks, and Venetians in the Peloponnesos in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from the Latin invasion to the period when certain traditions of interconfessional communication between the conquerors and the Romaioi developed. Using the accounts of the Chronicle of the Moraia, resolutions of the Venetian Senate, Venetian private-law documents, as well as Byzantine historical (George Akropolites, George Pachymeres, John VI Kantakouzenos), polemical (John VI Kan- takouzenos), and epistolary (Gregory Akindynos) writings, the article has analyzed the features of Greek-Latin contacts in the religious sphere, the nature of the contra- dictions between the Orthodox and the Catholics, the cases of change of confession and combined worship, considering the incidence of the said phenomena. The con- clusion is that the gateway to the long-term and relatively peaceful coexistence of the Greeks and Latins in the Peloponnesos was the Latins’ loyal policy towards the other-believers performed from the moment they initially appeared on the peninsula. In case of the biggest part of the Greek-Latin population of the Moraia, their relations with neighbours were most often of a compromise nature. Peaceful forms of inter- confessional contacts between the Latins and the Romaioi were more common than open conflicts on religious grounds. The arousing conflicts were generally associated with the actions of specific figures of strangers who represented the central government, and often had a pronounced political colouring.

.У. МЕЙТЛЕНД – П.Г. ВИНОГРАДОВ: УНИВЕРСИТЕТСКИЙ ВОПРОС В АКАДЕМИЧЕСКИХ БИОГРАФИЯХ ПРОФЕССОРОВ

This article discusses the problems of higher education in Great Britain and Russia between the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century as viewed by the historian and lawyer F.W. Maitland (1850–1906) and the Russian-English legal historian P.G. Vinogradoff (1854–1925), both struggled to reform higher education in these countries. The relevance of the study is due to insufficient data on the activities of British and Russian historians to transform the traditional system for training lawyers and historians at Cambridge and Moscow universities. Comparative analysis of the weak spots identified by F.W. Maitland and P.G. Vinogradoff in the English and Russian systems of university education was carried out by studying their articles and epistolary writings with the help of historical-comparative, historical, and biographical methods of research. The conclusions obtained help to understand the life paths of F.W. Maitland and P.G. Vinogradoff and are of potential interest for lecture courses on the historiography of the world and Russian history. The active role played by the scholars in bringing change to the education systems at Cambridge and Moscow universities influenced them considerably: for F.W. Maitland, who had acquired no higher rank but professorship since 1888, it hampered career growth; for P.G. Vinogradoff, it had fatal consequences in Russia (two resignations (1901, 1911) and emigration), but he acquired British citizenship and finally became an outstanding historian and jurist in England, which turned out to be an irretrievable loss for Russia.

Intimacy, Memory and Revelation: HIV/AIDS Representations in Néstor Perlongher’s and Caio Fernando Abreu’s Epistolary Writing

This article analyzes the epistolary works of writers Néstor Perlongher and Caio Fernando Abreu. Both authors share their experiences living with HIV/AIDS in their personal correspondence that has been recently published in different publishing houses in São Paulo and Buenos Aires (Agir and Santiago Arcos editor). This article reads through this affective archive that both authors left for posterity and suggests Perlongher and Abreu have a contrasting system of writing about the epidemic and what it represents for gay men in the region. Despite being authors that followed different paths to develop their literary interests, Perlongher and Abreu left for posterity an archive that provides a comprehensive understanding of the social, medical and political aspects of living with HIV/AIDS in Latin America.

Life of an Exile


 
 
 What kind of impact did social networks of Song literati have on their lives in exile? This paper focuses on Sun Di 孫覿 (1081–1169), a prominent literary figure in the Northern to Southern Song transition, and studies his epistolary writings in connection with his banishment to Xiangzhou 象州 in the years 1133 and 1134. Through an in-depth analysis of the contents of his letters, the paper shows how Sun Di established ties with officials in different localities and how he responded to the humiliation of banishment. I argue that Sun Di’s reputation as a literary stylist among his contemporaries helped him to develop a good rapport with local officials, particularly in the Guangnan West circuit, which was essential to creating a relatively comfortable exile journey and a pleasant life during his confinement. This study highlights the value of letters as historical sources pertaining to Song political and literati culture and sheds light on literati responses to life’s many challenges.
 
 

Enclosed Self-introspection and Camouflage: Interior Monologue in Republican Chinese Women’s Epistolary and Diary Writing

In Republican women writers’ works, the diary and epistolary modes are two common styles to reveal characters’ interior monologue (IM) and the flow of consciousness in fiction. The women writers often attempt to convey the self-introspection with female awareness through both narrative forms; in particular, women writers use it to express the narra¬tor/characters’ IM in a private enclosed situation. Through the specific textual analysis, it can be seen that the authors attempted to imply something through both of these narrative forms; in particular, women writers used this as a way to express the characters’ IM in private situations; for another thing, the usage of epistolary or diary forms could enable women writers to avoid possible criticism or blame when they tried to express their feminist feelings or thoughts. To some extent, this private narrative form provided an existential space for their discourse. No matter for the diary or the letter, seemingly it is merely a personal expression of thoughts and emotion, however in fact this was women writers’ intentional choice. They clearly knew that female writing was not yet the established norm, so most of women writers showed cautiousness in their creative writing. It achieves a more effective negotiation with a patriarchal society.

Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution by Kacy Dowd Tillman

Reviewed by: Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution by Kacy Dowd Tillman Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch STRIPPED AND SCRIPT: LOYALIST WOMEN WRITERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, by Kacy Dowd Tillman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. 224 pp. $28.95 paperback. Kacy Dowd Tillman's new book, Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution, makes an impressive contribution to our understanding of how white women in the era of the American Revolution shaped and expressed their political identity. She joins a growing number of scholars who assert that women in revolutionary America were political beings with their own individual political allegiances. Stripped and Script explores the political identity of eight Philadephia-area women, using "intimate political writing conducted in domestic spaces" to uncover a sliding scale of political allegiances among these elite, white women as they experienced the shortages, traumas, and loneliness of the homefront during the American Revolution (p. 24). The women—Grace Growden Galloway, Sarah Logan Fisher, Elizabeth Drinker, Margaret Hill Morris, Anna Rawle, Rebecca Shoemaker, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, and Deborah Norris Logan—crafted self-described politicized epistolary narratives that ranged between disaffected, pacifist, neutral, loyalist, and patriot. Tillman skillfully argues that these manuscripts were political tools and that the women used this epistolary space to express and refine their political ideas, loyalties, and opinions. Consequently, she asserts that the women used writing as a means of political engagement that is part of the larger national revolutionary narrative. Tillman uses "letter-journals" as the primary form of source material for her study, although she also occasionally includes the women's public petitions, poems, and individual letters. Letter-journals took on heightened importance when Philadelphia was under military occupation during the war (by the British, United States, or both depending on one's political orientation). Sending letters during the war was difficult and dangerous, so the women created sets or booklets of continuously scripted letters that spread across multiple days and pages and then sent them all together as a single packet or bundle (pp. 12–15). According to Tillman, these bundles of letters written over time often took on the character of a journal, and the writer sometimes moved back and forth between addressing her intended recipient (a husband, sister, or child) and a more autobiographical style of writing. For Tillman, this fluid form of writing creates an epistolary space where these women developed, expressed, and refined their multifaceted political [End Page 161] allegiances in forceful and bold ways that early American women did not dare speak out loud in public. Interestingly, however, Tillman contends that because letter-journals were circulated among family and friends and sometimes read aloud by others, published in part, or surveilled by military and political officials, these manuscripts were in essence semi-public in nature. Tillman argues that the authors were aware that others might read their letters and in some cases intentionally penned them as political narratives in ways that allowed them to make public statements, while simultaneously maintaining their status as respectable femes covert. One of the most important contributions Stripped and Script makes to existing studies of early American women is that it broadens the way scholars define political loyalty. Beyond just oaths, military service, and formal or legal definitions of treason, Tillman deftly establishes that women's epistolary writings blurred the boundaries between public and private and can be used as a way to access elite, white women's political ideas. These women's writings clearly demonstrate that they thought deeply about their own political loyalties and had strong opinions about the events of the revolution. Moreover, Tillman demonstrates that the women in her study had well-developed, strong political opinions that were different than those of their husbands or fathers. This injection of women's political allegiances into the broader narrative of the American Revolution promises to reshape the history of the early American political culture in important ways. Less convincing is Tillman's use of metaphorical rape. There are several places throughout the book where Tillman suggests that the women in her study intentionally deployed the rhetoric of rape to reframe rebel soldiers and their supporters in a negative light (p...

Arabic as a Language of the South Asian Chancery: Bahmani Communications to the Mamluk Sultanate

Abstract A growing body of literature on trade and cultural exchange between the Indian Ocean regions has already contributed significantly to our understanding of these processes and the role of language and writing within them. Yet, the question remains how Arabic correspondence played a part in communications between South Asian powers and the rulers in the Red Sea region. In order to begin filling this lacuna, this article studies epistolary writings from the Bahmani Sultanate (748/1347-934/1528) to the Mamluk Sultanate (648/1250-922/1517) during the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century. The contextualisation and discussion of three letters render insight both into the (up to now unstudied) issues at play in Bahmani-Mamluk relations and into the nature of these Arabic texts.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reflections on the French Revolution in her Letters

Mary Wollstonecraft went to Paris in December 1792 to see revolutionary France for herself. Her experience in France had significant effects on her understanding of the French Revolution and even changed her earlier ideas about the Revolution. This paper traces Wollstonecraft’s view of the Revolution by examining her lesser known epistolary introduction for “A Series of Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation” and her other writings, including her reviews of other writers’ epistolary works and her personal correspondence. This paper first looks at Wollstonecraft’s reviews on Helen Maria Williams’s Letters Written in France (1790) and Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790) to investigate Wollstonecraft’s ideas of the published epistolary writings and to illuminate their influence on her introductory letter. It also explores her personal letter to Joseph Johnson on 26 December 1792 to examine the ways in which she wrote her eyewitness account of revolutionary France in her personal correspondence. The introductory letter, written two months after her arrival in Paris, reveals her initial response to France and shows her confusion between her expectations of the Revolution and what she actually witnessed in France. By exploring the internal evidence in the introductory letter, this paper sketches out what “A Series of Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation” was like. It then examines how Wollstonecraft offered her philosophical reflection on the Revolution in this introductory letter. However, she discontinued her epistolary project and instead started writing the history of the Revolution of 1789. This paper finishes by tracing the reasons why she stopped writing the epistolary work and began writing in the genre of history.

Everyday Life of the Late Byzantine Imperial Court Viewed by the Contemporary

The Imperial court was the center of political life of the Byzantine Empire. It was the place where the Emperor, government departments, bureaucracy and the highest nobility were concentrated. The informal life of the Byzantine court, unlike its ceremonial life, is poorly studied by scientists. This article is devoted to the study of the daily life of the Imperial court of the time of the Palaeologoi dynasty and court manners. The main sources are historical and epistolary writings of Byzantine authors and reports of European travelers. Using the methods of historical anthropology, the author of the article studies the specifics of the Palace life, especially the work of court services, court etiquette, as well as characterizes the manners of the official elite and the rules of life at court.

‘I fear you will burn my present letter on recognising the handwriting’:1 The Self-Fashioning of Patrick Branwell Brontë in his Epistolary Writing

During the period 1845–48 Patrick Branwell Brontë can be seen using his skills as a writer to fashion multiple personas which enabled him to disguise the coarse nature of his reality, and deny responsibility for his numerous failures. Branwell adopted this method of self-presentation in his epistolary writing, and manipulated the form in order to present the personas which assisted in his denial. The coarseness of Branwell’s life broke forth into his correspondence and, in his state of desperation, he adopted the alter egos of Henry Hastings and Northangerland, the fictitious representations of his coarseness. The letters of Branwell are a greatly overlooked source. Yet, he clearly adopted the creative techniques he honed in his juvenilia and poetry for his epistolary writing. The consideration of Branwell’s letters is essential in assisting our understanding of him as a writer.

Making sense of Rome in the eighteenth century: walking and the French aesthetic imagination

This article traces the contours of a new way in which Rome was explored, imagined, and represented in the eighteenth century in texts and images by French travelers. These narratives, found in epistolary writings and the pictorial arts, reflected and suggested that viewers, readers, or strollers could enter into landscapes, wander through streetscapes, and commune with the past in both the space of the city and the space of representation. These narratives, found in epistolary writings and the pictorial arts, reflected and suggested that viewers, readers, or strollers could enter into landscapes, wander through streetscapes, and commune with the past in both the space of the city and the space of representation. French travelers brought with them a new modern form of walking linked to the creation of Parisian public boulevards, while contemporary philosophy associated the production of knowledge directly to the sensorial apparatus of the body. Writers would describe contemporary encounters with imagined figures from ancient history, while artists would visually reconfigure such encounters through the genre of the Roman capriccio. This pictorial mode was turned toward an exploration of the various ways in which movement, real or imagined, gave rise to popular forms of experiencing the Eternal City directly as well as to a verbal and visual language to express it to others. What this teaches us is that, for the enlightenment visitor, looking was not a passive act of consumption, but an active engagement with complex, confusing, and evocative material remains of the ancient city within the frame of the modern one.

Kobiety w listach Grzegorza z Nazjanzu

The article seeks to present this part of the epistolary writings of Gregory of Nazianzus that is addressed to women or applies for them. Among the female audience of the bishop we find women from diverse backgrounds and of various marital status. Widows were the most represented group. Gregory often wrote his letters on their behalf, asking powerful members of society – other bishops or high-ranking civil officials – for support their concerns. Some of these women were distressed by financial and law troubles. Unfortunately, in most of the cases we do not know the causes of their worries. It is worth to notice that among the widows that appear in Gregory’s letters there were also independent and powerful women who helped the priest or the local Church. In Gregory’s letters we also find a few ascetics. One of them, Thecla, can be acknowledged as the closest female friend of our author. There is only one letter that the bishop wrote in the name of a young maiden, his niece Eugenia, who was harmed by her coheirs. Gregory also helped two married women to solve their marital problems.

W kręgu twórczości Anny Frajlich, czyli o Międzynarodowej Konferencji Naukowej „Tu jestem / zamieszkuję własne życie”. Twórczość poetycka, prozatorska i epistolarna Anny Frajlich (i nie tylko…)

On October 24-25, 2016 the University of Rzeszów hosted the International Conference “Here I am / I inhabit my own life”. Poetry, prose and epistolary writings of Anna Frajlich, whose honored guest was famous Polish poet, writer, essayist, editor, lecturer of Polish language and literature at Columbia University in New York City. The aim of meeting was to describe Frajlich’s individual poetics, discuss her place in literary tradition, analyze a variety of her styles, motives, topics and toposes used. The speakers were also interested in the biography of the poet perceived in the contexts of such cultural and methodological notions as identity, emigration, alienation or re-rooting. The conference was organized by Institute of Polish Philology of the University of Rzeszów, Department of Theory and Anthropology of Literature, Workshop of Research and Record of Literary Culture, and Polish Philology Faculty of Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992 by José L. Venegas (review)

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992 by José L. Venegas William Flores Venegas, José L. Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2014. Pp. 241. ISBN 978-0-81421-256-1. In this carefully researched study, entitled Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992, José Venegas appeals to scholars and readers with specialized background knowledge in the field of modern Hispanic transatlantic correspondence. The author begins each chapter with a descriptive analysis of specific epistolary works and then expands to include related literary and theoretical criticism in order to build toward an analysis of various cultural and political issues. The concluding arguments found at the end of every chapter should prove to be valuable to scholars of epistolary and cultural studies. The introductory chapter provides a useful and well-developed historiographical presentation of relevant criticism that includes references to some of the most important critics in modern literary studies including Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Walter Mignolo, Paul de Man, and Fredric Jameson. Equally important, this chapter thoroughly describes cultural Eurocentric notions concerning Hispanism supported mainly by Miguel de Unamuno and Pedro Salinas. The chapter also yields significant evidence supporting the use of the epistolary genre as a subversive antidogmatic tool incorporating examples that include the works of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, José Cadalso, and Juan Valera in Spain, and elsewhere, the epistolary representations of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Rubén Darío. In Chapter 1, “Epistolarity and the Rhetoric of Hispanism,” Venegas produces a careful examination of works authored by Unamuno and, to a lesser extent, writings of Ángel Rama y Alberto María Carreño, focusing on how their texts attempt to configure a transatlantic Hispanism and a cohesive Hispanic self. After providing this examination, Venegas concludes that the epistolary form can be a rhetorical strategy to encompass difference and oppression within the context of colonial discourse; simultaneously, this literary form was used by Unamuno to transform the political divisions created by the Spanish American independence movements into textual matter that could be easily assimilated to a common Hispanic culture. Noteworthy substantial analysis of Unamuno’s discourse is offered in this chapter for readers interested in the intertextual connections between Unamuno and other notable Hispanic writers. Chapter 2, “Quixotic Correspondence,” gives a detailed description of how Salinas as well as other exiled Spaniard authors such as Paulino Masip, José Gaos, and Américo Castro used letters to substantiate their proposal to conceptualize Spanish America as an extension and a continuation of a Spanish cultural unity and to protect values associated with Spanish civilization that were threatened by the excessive materialism, rationalism, and individualism of North American modernity. In addition to conferring a detailed portrayal of the perspectives of the Spaniard authors analyzed, the chapter could be further developed by either incorporating additional criticism of such perspectives or enlarging the selection of epistolary writings chosen for analysis. Chapter 3, “Postal Insurgency,” provides a succinct outline of the struggles of the postal system in Mexico after the Mexican Revolution and successfully sustains that letter writing is often transformed into a resistance to abusive structures of power. Additionally, in chapter 4, “Transatlantic Transitions,” Venegas effectively supports his assertion that epistolarity is used as a guide to analyze the impact of dictatorial rule across the Hispanic world and that this form has served as a response to this rule and has contributed to the return to transnational modern democracy. Chapter 5, “Failed Deliveries,” examines the continuity of the discourse that attempts to configure a transatlantic Hispanic unity as portrayed in the works of Gabriel García Márquez. The chapter focuses on how the Colombian Nobel laureate uses the motif of the letter to revisit the transatlantic bonds between Spain and Latin America and to elucidate cultural values traditionally associated with Spanish civilization. While considering the use of epistolarity in El amor en los tiempos del cólera and El general en su laberinto, Venegas provides a reading of [End Page 840] these novels as the fictional manifestations of...

The Reader in al-Jāḥiẓ: The Epistolary Rhetoric of an Arabic Prose MasterBy Thomas Hefter

Scholarship on al-Jāḥiẓ seems to have experienced a fortunate revival in the last years. Three books devoted to the so-called father of Arabic prose were published in 2014: James E. Montgomery’s Al-Jāḥiẓ: in praise of books (Edinburgh: 2013); Peter Pökel’s Der unmännliche Mann (Würzburg: Ergon, 2014); and the study under review here, Thomas Hefter’s The Reader in al-Jāḥiẓ. Hefter’s book also inaugurates a new series published by Edinburgh University Press under the editorial care of Wen-Chin Ouyang and Julia Bray, the Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature. Hefter’s study is without doubt an important contribution to Jāḥizian scholarship both for his innovative approach and the variety of the epistles he examines, many of which are among the least studied and discussed of al-Jāḥiẓ’s works. This book consists of five chapters, plus the introduction and the conclusion. In the long introduction, Hefter defines the goals of his work and discusses the theoretical framework used to interpret al-Jāḥiẓ’s epistles. Despite the title, the main focus of the book is on the role of the addressee in al-Jāḥiẓ’s epistolary writings. Following the studies of scholars such as Genette or Altman, the addressee is conceived of as an ‘intradiegetic narratee’ or ‘internal reader’ (p. 15) and treated by Hefter as a narrative device by means of which al-Jāḥiẓ engages with his audience and directs his readers. This rhetorical device allows al-Jāḥiẓ to leave to the reader ‘the task of discerning how the author’s dialogical relationship with him is refracted through what is said to the addressee’ (p. 17). The figure of the addressee and his relationships with the author—or one of his authorial personae—inform the reader’s expectations and their understanding of these works. It should be noted that Hefter is clear about rejecting discussion of the figure of the addressee in terms of his historicity; his goal is not to discern whether he is a real correspondent of al-Jāḥiẓ or a fictional construction, but rather to discuss his role within al-Jāḥiẓ’s epistolary narrative.

Elite Female Authors in the Field of Power in Eighteenth‐Century Portugal: Epistolary Writing as Part of a Political Strategy

AbstractThis paper explores the role of Enlightenment women through an analysis of their social behaviour. The semi‐public and semi‐private features of an epistolary corpus reveal the boundaries marking the accepted pattern for women's intervention in the cultural field at that time, and behaviours that transgress these boundaries. This research focuses on eighteenth‐century Portugal in the context of other cultural spaces, in order to establish parameters useful for the study of the role of women's in eighteenth‐century cultural fields.

Major Minor Form: Marginalia on Rahel Levin Varnhagen'sRahel. Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde

Since the Wiederentdeckung einer within the framework of a conference organized in 1986,1 Levin Varnhagen, the renowned intellectual and epistolary writer from the time of Goethe, has received renewed attention in literary studies.2 Recently published critical editions produced subsequent to this conference have made a significant contribution to this development-not only by making accessible previously unpublished correspondence from Rahel's literary estate, but also, as a result of the complex structure of this estate (see Landfester, Nachwort 625), by raising questions pertaining to literary theory and consequently opening up new paths for research. At the center of this research, as announced in the title of the conference, is the authoressRahel, and thusthequestionof how to conceptualize a productivity that was asserted almost exclusively in the form of correspondence-a genre with connotations that has been marginalized in literary history. The reassessment of the letter as a mode of writing sui generis is hence among the most important outcomes of this research, which has advanced pioneering reflections on the contexts of genre,3 authorship, and work.4 It may be stated that the specific literary experiment of the Briefschreiberin could be rediscovered only when a fundamental Umdenken in der Kritik der Gattungstypologie had developed (Feilchenfeldt 261).In this connection, the concept of a work becomes the productive category of differentiation. In the paradoxical modus of a grose Schriftstellerin [...] ohne Werk(Hahn,AntwortenSiemir11), Rahelappearspreciselyat themoment when her writings are no longer measured against the model of klassische Autonomieasthetik and its Telos eines in sich geschlossenen type of writing centered on the author's name, and when, instead, the Verweigerung der 'klassischen' Werknorm becomes the starting point for a different way of thinking about a work (Landfester, Durchstreichungen 53). Consequently, it is worth considering how to publish Rahel's extensive, and, in part, voluminous exchange of letters with nearly three hundred correspondents-preponderantly nameless intellectuals, male and female friends, and family members. More precisely, it must be considered how it would be possible to publish this Netzwerk (Hahn, Rahel 11), conceived of in terms of a dialogue beyond thefunction oftheauthor and beyond canonizedstrategies of transmission,5 in such a way that the auctorial order of speech is suspended in the work and a different-eccentric-order is created.Against this backdrop, what interests me is one of Rahel's writing projects that, in contrast to the problematic nature of a work that has been outlined, nonetheless seems to provide a solid Autor-Standbild (Schuller, 'Unsere Sprache' 43). Unlike Rahel's prolific epistolary writings, Rahel. Ein Buch des Andenkens fur ihre Freunde presents not an exchange of interrelated voices, but instead Rahel's discourse alone, a selection of her letters to various addressees, as well as notations and accounts that she wrote. Levin and her husband Karl August Varnhagen had already prepared a first edition of this project during Rahel's lifetime. It was published as a one-volume, private printing in June 1833, shortly after Rahel's death. One year later, Varnhagen had a second, three-volume edition published by the publishing house Duncker und Humblot in Berlin. Afterward, Varnhagen continued his work on the Buch des Andenkens and prepared a third, greatly expanded version, which, however, was not publishedduring his lifetime. After the deathof Ludmilla Assing, hisniece andexecutor oftheestate,themanuscript found its way tothe Konigliche Bibliothek in Berlin in 1881, was moved to Silesia in 1941, and was finally brought to the Biblioteka Jagiello^ska in Krakow in 1945. There, in 1984, Barbara Hahn rediscovered the manuscript, which was published as a six-volume edition in 2011 after decades of preparatory work. …