Writing for Strangers: A Transatlantic Study of the Eighteenth-Century Public Letter

由于被迫取消海外旅行，我买了大量的书，把时间花在阅读有关叙事、体裁和公共领域的理论上。从叙事学的角度，我能够推进我对公共信件研究的理论框架。我还重新审视了以前对18世纪文化的研究，发现化妆舞会、漫画的语言与流行期刊中关于公众人物及其互动的写作中使用的修辞之间存在相似之处。我用这个发现来修改我以前在《旁观者》上关于读者来信的工作。这将成为一本书的一章，我提供的摘要如下：最近的工作对社会历史的化妆舞会挑战特里城堡的20世纪80年代后结构主义阅读。包括报纸和广告在内的历史文献表明，化妆舞会实际上并没有破坏社会规范和类别。相反，特别是在18世纪早期，化装舞会充当了阶级和等级的执行者。从物理上讲，这是一个封闭的事件，发生在墙壁内，并要求高昂的入场费。参与者被要求遵守一定的规则和礼仪，如果不遵守，就会受到嘲笑。基于对这场假面舞会的新阅读，我重新解读了《旁观者》中的读者来信（以前常常被认为是微不足道的），将其视为"旁观者项目"的一个组成部分，该项目旨在教育读者成为一个城市世界的适当公民。

Due to the forced cancellation of overseas trips, I made a large purchase of books and devoted my time to reading about theories of narrative, genre, and the public sphere. I was able to advance the theoretical framework of my research about public letters from a narratological perspective. I also revisited previous studies of eighteenth-century culture, and discovered a similarity between the language of masquerade, caricature, and the rhetoric used in writing about public characters and their interactions in popular periodicals. I used this finding to revise my previous work on readers' letters in The Spectator. This will become a book chapter, the summary of which I provide below:Recent work on the social history of the masquerade have challenged Terry Castle's 1980s poststructuralist reading. Historical documents including newspapers and advertisements reveal that the masquerade did not in fact render the disruption of social norms and categories. Instead, especially during the early part of the eighteenth century, the masquerade acted as an enforcer of class and rank. Physically speaking, it was a closed event, taking place within walls and claiming a high price for admission. Participants were expected to conform to certain rules and etiquette, and ridiculed when failing to do so. Building on this new reading of the masquerade, I reinterpret readers' letters (previously oftened dismissed as insignificant) in The Spectator as an integral part of the "Spectatorial Project" which seeks to educate its readers into proper citizens of an urbane world.