The technology of politeness: Interdisciplinarity and the case of Frances Burney's Evelina

Abstract

Epistolary novels played a particularly powerful role in assisting their readers to master the technologies of politeness (including the technology of the polite letter) that assumed enormous importance for an emergent 18th-century middle class. Frances Burney's Evelina is an especially apt examination of this technology of politeness. Using Evelina as our example, we argue that, ultimately, there is no absolute boundary between dealing with the complexities of a literary text and considering modern professional texts such as workplace email.