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

由于被迫取消海外旅行，我大量购买书籍，把时间花在阅读叙事、体裁和公共领域的理论上。我能够从叙事学的角度提出我对公开信研究的理论框架。我还重温了以前对18世纪文化的研究，发现在流行期刊上，化妆、漫画的语言和写作中关于公共人物及其相互作用的修辞有相似之处。我利用这一发现修改了我之前在《旁观者》上关于读者来信的工作。这将成为书中的一个章节，我将在下面提供摘要：最近关于化妆舞会社会史的著作挑战了特里·卡塞尔上世纪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，伪装实际上并没有扰乱社会规范和类别。相反，特别是在18世纪初，化妆舞会扮演了阶级和等级的实施者的角色。从身体上讲，这是一项封闭的活动，在城墙内举行，门票要求很高。参与者被要求遵守某些规则和礼仪，如果没有做到这一点，就会受到嘲笑。在这次对《化妆舞会》的新解读的基础上，我重新解读了《旁观者》上的读者来信(以前经常被认为是无关紧要的)，将其作为旨在教育读者成为文明世界中适当公民的“旁观者计划”的组成部分。

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 Historical documents including newspapers and advertisements reveal that the masquerade did not in fact render the disruption of social norms and categories.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.