

From the Seventeenth Century on, starting with French letter writing guides like those of Pierre Richelet (Les plus belles lettres des meilleurs auteurs français, first edition 1689), the idea of a particular female talent for writing letters in an unaffected and natural manner became a commonplace in European literature. Various interchanges between epistolary novels and letter writing guides tend to show that the fictional status of female letters, even if they were written by male authors, did not keep them from being considered as exemplary. The Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669) ended up in Richelet’s Plus belles lettres, the letters Richardson atttributed to Pamela in his eponymous novel (1740) were originally meant to form a letter writing guide or conduct book, while Gellert even goes so far as to feminize the male authorial voice in his Praktische Abhandlung von dem guten Geschmacke in Briefen (1751) in order to strengthen his case against the German letter writing tradition of the „Kanzleistil“ (stylus curiae), still much in use in Germany in the first half of the Eighteenth Century.
- Premessa
- Lichtenberg – «ein Cäsar im Briefschreiben»
- «Nerfs de femmes». Briefroman, Briefsteller und die Autorfunktion bei Guilleragues, Richelet und Gellert
- Il mondo in una busta. La forma epistolare come paradigma rappresentativo dell’ideologia illuminista francese
- Un viandante notturno scrive all’amata: storia di una lettera, di una poesia e delle sue edizioni
- «Nur das Gespräch hilft mir eigentlich die Vorstellung des andern schnell zu fassen und fest zu halten». La lettera nella produzione saggistica e drammatica di Schiller
- Un romanzo epistolare italiano nel Tournant des Lumières: Per questi dilettosi monti di Carlo Botta
- Geselligkeit ed emancipazione femminile. Carl Wilhelm Frölich, Henriette Frölich e un esempio di Briefroman utopico: Virginia oder die Kolonie von Kentucky
- Ultime lettere dell’amico Nathanael
- Intimità e distanza: Inserti epistolari nei Buddenbrooks
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal e l’anacronismo epistolare
- La forma epistolare nella scrittura critica di Rainer Maria Rilke: la lettera da imago animae a sachliches Sagen
- Su alcune lettere di Kafka
- «Sehr geehrter Herr Sektionschef!» Oder: Wie aus einem Appell (fast) eine Obligation wird. Der Brief in Franz Werfels Novelle Eine blaßblaue Frauenschrift
- Saggi
- Recensioni
- Abstracts