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

由于被迫取消了海外旅行，我买了大量的书，把时间花在阅读叙事理论、体裁和公共领域上。我能够从叙事学的角度推进我对公开信研究的理论框架。我还重新审视了以前对18世纪文化的研究，发现假面舞会、漫画的语言与公众人物及其在流行期刊上的互动所使用的修辞之间存在相似之处。我用这个发现来修改我之前在《旁观者》上关于读者来信的研究。这将成为一本书的一章，我将其总结如下：最近关于假面舞会社会史的研究挑战了特里·卡斯尔（Terry Castle） 20世纪80年代的后结构主义阅读。包括报纸和广告在内的历史文献表明，假面舞会实际上并没有造成社会规范和类别的破坏。相反，特别是在18世纪早期，假面舞会扮演了阶级和等级的执行者的角色。从物理上讲，这是一个封闭的活动，发生在墙内，并要求高价入场。参与者被要求遵守一定的规则和礼仪，如果不这样做，就会受到嘲笑。在这种对假面舞会的新解读的基础上，我重新解读了《旁观者》中读者的来信（以前经常被认为是无关紧要的），将其视为“旁观者计划”的一个组成部分，该计划旨在教育读者成为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 Historical documents including newspapers and advertisements reveal that the masquerade did not in fact render the disruption of social norms and categories.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.