The Correlation between Historiography and Literature of Confession [Articol]

Abstract

Correspondence, alongside with autobiographies, memoirs and diaries, belongs to the literature of confession. Being a literary perception, it also maintains its quality as a source of information for historiographers. It is difficult to identify from confessional writing how much belongs to the actual history and how much is literature. The present study will offer some suggestions on this perspective and will provide a historical retrospective of the Epistle which reveals its contradictory way to great literature. We shall try to delineate between the actual and the literary correspondence, making some reference to the poetics of communication. In this respect, we shall address the following dichotomies: private/public correspondence, documentary/authentic/fictional correspondence etc.