Life after the death of the letter: German post -epistolary cultures, 1832–1910

The condition of German epistolary culture in the nineteenth century is commonly perceived by literary critics in the light of the ‘end of the Briefroman.’ On the other hand, recent investigations have shown that the media of communication and their technological basis were profoundly discussed in the period. Bridging the gap between technology and literature, this dissertation investigates some of the most current cultural attitudes towards letter-writing and epistolarity from the perspective of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century fiction-writers (from Karl Gutzkow to Ricarda Huch), as well as cultural historians and journalists to argue that, especially after 1850, definitions of Kommunikation begin to be divided into a dichotomy between ‘culture’ and ‘technology,’ a logic that continues to affect the way in which critical theory understands the decay of epistolary literature in the Industrial Age