Dimensions of Europe Lunch Lecture - Yvonne Völkl & Elisabeth Hobisch

Carrying Knowledge Across Paper: Literary Letters

In this talk we present our third-party funded research project “Spanish Letters. From Spectator Press to Epistolary Novel” (FWF, PAT3363224) focusing on the evolution of the letter form in Spanish literature. Our research is situated in the Age of Enlightenment, which is a highly intriguing and pivotal period of research as in the course of the 18th century numerous sociocultural transformations took place which influence our (Western) society and our perception of the world and humanity until today. One may think of the replacement of religion as a key factor in identity by politics, the emergence of gender as a key social category or the propagation of empirical scientific methods and a diversification of scientific disciplines. For the democratization of this newly gained knowledge on society and the world a plethora of print media were used. 

In general, the ‘letter form’ or ‘epistolary mode’ was a favored choice by 18th and 19th century European authors to educate their readers. Especially the literary-journalistic genre of the Spectator press made broad use of fictitious readers’ letters. Additionally to disseminating enlightened thoughts and concepts, it also contributed to familiarize authors and readers with the epistolary mode in a literary form. It was repeatedly suggested that at the end of the 18th century, when the Spectator press gradually disappeared, it transformed into other literary formats and, thus, prepared the emergence of the epistolary novel. 

In this talk we will outline and contextualize the two corpora of literary letters, at the focus of this project, the Spectator press and the epistolary novel in Spain, and draw attention to the formal-aesthetic and thematic connection between these two under-researched corpora. 

Yvonne Völkl and Elisabeth Hobisch are both researchers in French and Spanish Literary and Cultural Studies. From 2021 to 2024, they worked on the project “Corona Fictions. On Viral Narratives in Times of Pandemics,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, project number: P 34571, Grant-DOI: 10.55776/P34571). As part of this project, they have given numerous lectures and published the collective work Pandemic Protagonists. Viral (Re)Actions in Pandemic and Corona Fictions (transcript, 2023) as well as several related articles. Currently, they are investigating the transformation of the letter form in Spain at the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries in their third-party funded project “Spanish Letters: From Spectator Press to Epistolary Novel” (FWF, PAT 3363224, Grant-DOI: 10.55776/PAT3363224).