SOURCE: “The Eighteenth Century Epistolary Body and the Public Sphere,” in Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters, Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 5-29.

In the following excerpt, Cook discusses Charles Louis de Montesquieu's 1721 Lettres persanes, Samuel Richardson's 1747 Clarissa, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni's 1757 Fanni Butlerd, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, works which, she argues, illustrate the epistolary genre's evolving concern for the boundaries between public and private domains.

Letter and Contract: the Body of Writing

If the rhetorical structure of the letter always makes us ask, “Who writes, and to whom?”, the eighteenth-century letter-narrative provokes a more specific question: “What does it mean to write from the crossroads of public and private, manuscript and print, at this particular historical moment?”

In his essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault makes an assertion about the forms I explore in this...