(co-taught by Dianah Leigh Jackson (French)
This is a jointly taught seminar on early modern English and French epistolary fiction, cross-listed with French and Comparative Literature. The course and texts will be taught in English. Early modern European literary culture produced a great age of letter writing, and this epistolary habit had a crucial impact on the growth of the modern novel, which began almost literally by adopting the form of the letter as a way of telling invented stories. We will survey this subject from beginnings in the Portugese Letters (1669), with glances at works like Eliza Haywood’s sensational romance Love in Excess (1719-20) , Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (1731-41), and Richardson’s Pamela (1740).

The main reading of the course will be concentrated in two internationally triumphant examples of the genre: Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48), which sent not just England but all of Europe into a frenzy of reader involvement with that tragic story, and crucially influenced the second main text of this course, Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Héloise (1761), which, like Clarissa before, had readers all over Europe in the grip of its love story and passionate fictional debate about earthly versus spiritual value. Our aim in the seminar is to give students an opportunity to study this very important cultural and literary history, and to reflect on its theoretical implications, in an interdisciplinary setting. We will introduce a range of related topics along the way, including the material history of letter-writing in the early modern period, the genre and gender of letters, class implications of a democratized narrative form, and modern analogues like email correspondence or fictionalization. Both faculty will be involved in every class session, in an effort to model a genuinely cross-disciplinary approach to the subject. You won’t need a background in French. For questions or more information check with Tom Lockwood (tlock@u.washington.edu).