(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 thesis thus looks back from the so-called ‘heyday of the essay’ in the first half of the 20th century to its prehistory, in which the letter, as a central medium of everyday life, also occupied a significant place in literary journalism. The concepts of rhetoric, criticism and politics form the three central discursive perspectives of the study. They derive from the thesis that the texts acquire their specific profile through a particular form of discourse, intervene critically in public debates and respond to political changes.