Dragging Out the Truth: Restoration Periodicals and the Textual Ceation of Gendered Identitities

Abstract

This article investigates how Restoration periodicals employed epistolary modes as a means to address their own status of fictionality. In two case studies, of John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury and Peter Motteux’s Gentleman’s Journal, the discussion demonstrates how these periodicals make use of the supposed reliability of epistolary writing in order to undermine the truth-claims that attach to the format. In both instances, letters are employed to undermine the supposed factuality of the letter, combining such metafictional gestures with a playful and highly performative understanding of gendered identities. The gendered body of the people involved in these epistolary communications becomes a site of speculation as the letters increasingly turn into questionable bodies of reliability.