Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500-1850 (review)

136 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 preoccupations of eighteenth-century life allows him to forge a sense of order out of the wealth of material he surveys. So Eighteenth-Century Writers in Their World is a useful if at times frustrating book. Its utility is limited by its intended audience and by its uneven handling of subject matter. But this introduction to English literary culture of the early eighteenth century provides a number of convincing textual readings, displays an admirable breadth of reference, and incorporates many of the theoretical concerns of recent critical debate. Varney's study may derive much of its conceptual framework from existing scholarship, but it succeeds in what it sets out to do: to generate a sense of enthusiasm for a period often unjustly neglected by undergraduate students and the reading public at large. Stephen Ahern Yale University Thomas O. Beebee. Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500-1850. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ? + 277pp. US$64.95. ISBN 0-521-62275-1. Thomas O. Beebee's ambitious study opens and closes under the sign of poststructuralism . His introduction cites Derrida's now-familiar pronouncement about epistolarity: "the letter, the epistle ... is not a genre but all genres, literature itself" (cited p. 15; Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond , trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], p. 48); his postscript closes with an allusion (oddly unattributed) to Lacan's equally famous assertion that "the letter always arrives at its destination" (Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,' " trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, reprinted in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Müller and William J. Richardson [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988], p. 53). As Barbara Johnson has pointed out, this claim, properly interpreted (that is, not as Derrida interprets it), signals "the impossibility ofany ultimate analytical metalanguage " ("The Frame of Reference," reprinted in The Purloined Poe). Beebee is indeed an adept of the paradoxes and undecidabilities of the letter. The poststructuralist bookends suggest one way in which this is a courageous project; the dates in Beebee's title, 1500 to 1 850, suggest another. While in the mid- 1990s, New Historically inflected studies by, say, Mary Favret (Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction ofLetters, 1993), or Nicola J. Watson (Revolution and the Form ofthe British Novel, 1790-1825, 1994), or—full disclosure—myself (Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic ofLetters, 1996) linked letter-narratives to what these studies argued were coherent and relatively limited historical periods, and restricted their focus to primary texts in one or two languages, Beebee's chapters examine literary letters from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, with frequent side excursions to England and Russia. REVIEWS 137 Beebee explicitly proposes a "pan-European" (p. 3) metaphysics ofthe letter, its feedback loops, power-gradients, and white-noise effects. The Foucauldian scaffolding occasionally seems somewhat disconnected from the readings ofindividual texts (and indeed largely falls away by chapter 4), but it offers a useful corrective to such still-pervasive critical habits as determining a text's literary worth according to its investment in representing psychologized subjects. Beebee is frank about the challenges of working at the interface ofthe Rare Book Room and the dynamic zones of poststructuralist philosophy. His "middle way" between what he calls the "Scylla and Charybdis" (p. 9) of either history without form or form without history is to write a "genealogy" of epistolary literature, in which "fictional forms ... no longer viewed as autonomous, become nothing other than the series of differentia and camouflages which fiction assumes vis-à-vis other, 'non-fictional' texts" (p. 11). The cross-pollination of fictional and historical letters drives Beebee's second chapter, a survey of letter-manuals from the medieval artes dictaminis to early nineteenth-century examples. Beebee argues that critics of letter-manuals and critics of letter-novels have ignored the continuous interinfluence of these forms in producing ideologies of social order. An illustration keyed to this chapter (from a 1662 German manual of love letters) shows a wealthy lover scribbling a letter in front of a smoking bed into which...

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