Epistolary kind

The epistolary kind is a formal kind which has as a characteristic that work is composed by a Correspondance or an exchange of correspondence. In the case of the epistolary Roman this correspondence fictitious, or is presented like fictitious. The term applies to works which have a unit set of themes, other than the publications of selective or exhaustive correspondences of which the only unit is that of the authors of the missives.

One uses also the expression in a different direction which will not be treated here, epistolary art, the technique of composition of a missive.

A very old kind

The oldest epistolary works date from graeco-latin Antiquity and form as of this time a clean kind declining itself in two forms: the collection of missives real or fictitious and the address with a real or fictitious correspondent. “Real” and “fictitious” getting along here concerning the reality of the correspondence or the correspondent, and not the real or fictitious character of the account.

For example, the poem epic and didactic Of rerum will natura (or Of rerum will natura) of Lucrèce is comparable to the epistolary kind, and the Lettres in Lucilius of Sénèque the Young person are presented like a series of letters, without in both cases one being able to think that a real correspondence took place. Horace , Cicéron and Ovide is also known for their epistolary work.

The Epistles of the Christian New Testament , and mainly those allotted to Paul de Tarse (the Epistles pauliniennes ) are an ancient overall known case arising from the epistolary kind, where the meeting of these writings has a unit strong set of themes and constitutes the base of the original body of doctrines Christian.

Various practices and various goals

One will not discuss here the epistolary novel, which has its own codes.

The works of the epistolary kind are composed in various ways: sometimes the supposed correspondents or, generally, one of them only, compose the work, sometimes it acts of a collection made by thirds, generally postmortem (in these cases the correspondence is supposed to be real); sometimes it is about an exchange of letters between two people or more, sometimes one retains only the missives of one of the correspondents. The unit set of themes is it also varied: it can be a question of a basic unit (the subject), of topic itself (the field concerned), chronological, of tone… Generally several of these cases of unit are found.

Like known as, one can divide this kind into two groups, the real and fictitious correspondences; for the oldest times, the division is not always obvious; for the modern and contemporary literature it is on the other hand more clearly in general, the cases of fictitious correspondence forming a kind in oneself: when Scarron composes its Épître grains , it does not make mystery of the fictitious character of the work; at the time, this kind of epistles is different little like the Satire (subtitle of the work of Scarron). In contrast, the correspondence of the marchioness of Sévigné to his/her daughter gives an account of a real epistolary exchange, even if there were a retravail of this correspondence.

A borderline case is the Lettres Persians of Montesquieu , which is basically an epistolary novel (fictitious correspondence between fictitious characters) comparable with the dangerous Liaisons of Choderlos de Laclos , but with moral goal, like the satirical epistle in vogue at the time of Scarron and Boileau, or the various epistles of the philosophers of the Century of the lights, with the first chief Voltaire and Diderot .

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