(Working title)
The dissertation project examines the connection between letter culture and essayism from the 18th century onward, a relation that scholarship has yet sufficiently to explore. By focusing on selected examples, I aim to explore in diachronic perspective why essayistic modes of writing frequently appear in the form of pseudo-letters or sequences of pseudo-letters well into the period around 1900.
The concepts of aesthetics, criticism and politics form the three central discursive perspectives of the study. They derive from the thesis that the texts to be analysed particularly distinguish their form in the examination of aesthetic positions, critically intervene in public debates and react to political impulses for change.