7 - Documenticity II

Summary

While French literary history usually presumes a firm tradition of the epistolary novel running from Lettres portuguaises in 1669 to the end of the following century, this chapter demonstrates that the form's rise was protracted, and proceeded in two stages. A first, modest popularity was achieved by novels of satirical observation. Formally, these epistolary novels were distinct from the much more successful epistolary novels that followed, which featured a polyphonic exchange of correspondence. Viewed formally, the history of the epistolary novel in France is largely discontinuous, though the polyphonic variant's own development displays the same isomorphism visible in other novelistic artifacts examined in this book.