La forma epistolar literaria en España en el tránsito del siglo XVIII al XIX / The Epistolary Form in Literature in Spain at the Turn of the 18th to the 19th Century

The upcoming international conference “La forma epistolar literaria en España en el tránsito del siglo XVIII al XIX” (The Epistolary Form in Literature in Spain at the Turn of the 18th to the 19th Century) will take place from November 26 to 28, 2026, at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) in Austria. 

The event is hosted within the framework of the FWF research project “Spanish Letters. From Spectator Press to Epistolary Novel” (PAT3363224), investigating how Spanish Spectator periodicals (“espectadores”) served as an experimental testing ground for the subsequent success of the epistolary novel, using fictional letters as emotional tools to introduce Enlightenment ideals to a growing bourgeois reading audience.

The conference brings together international scholars to comprehensively explore these epistolary practices across various media, such as reader correspondence in the Spectator press, travelogues, manuals and novels – linking them to central Enlightenment concepts like economy, sensibility, education, friendship and virtuous behavior. The academic program features a keynote lecture by Robert Vellusig (University of Graz) on “Letters and the Art of Social Distance Regulation” and hosts multiple panels with international experts discussing diverse topics such as domestic education in the early 19th-century press, female subjectivity, and postcolonial subject construction.