Romanian letter-writing: a cultural-rhetorical perspective (I)

Affiliations

¹Faculty of Letters, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Bd. Carol I 11, 700506 Iași, Romania
²Doctoral School of Philological Studies, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Bd. Carol I 11, 700506 Iași, Romania

History

Received December 10, 2015
Accepted December 14, 2015
Published February 12, 2016

Key words

rhetoric
letter
history of letter-writing

Motto

Abstract

The paper aims at revealing the cultural and rhetorical features of the Romanian letter-writing by outlining the key stages in the evolution of the letter in Europe and in the Romanian cultural space. In the subsequent ages, the profile of the rhetorical frame that enabled the development of letter-writing was governed by distinct guidelines, from the discursive canons of the Antiquity and the attempts to set out an epistolary theory in the postclassical age or the emergence of the medieval epistolary manuals and of the works of epistolary rhetoric from the Renaissance to the flourishing of private correspondence in the Baroque and the Enlightenment. The natural tendency to adapt the epistolary rhetoric to the idiomatic resources of the vernacular languages spoken in Europe favoured the outset and the advancement of a Romanian epistolary style whose cultural and rhetorical coordinates are sketched in the present article.

Copyright

© 2016 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.