Approaches to the correspondence of G. M. de Jovellanos, with twenty four unpublished letters

Abstract

This study approaches the correspondence of G. M. de Jovellanos from different areas: it sets out the main series of collected letters according to correspondents, sources of documents, themes and periods, and notes and explains the silences; shows the conscious decision to keep the correspondence and the concern about its confidentiality; notice the apocryphal nature of some edited letters and the peculiar textual transmission of those that we only known by drafts and excerpts; analyzes the institutional correspondence, at the border of epistolary gender; reconstructs forwarding series produced in the academic and personal level; studies the possible content of some lost letters; and works on Jovellanos reflections about the epistolary style. The appendix contains 24 unpublished letters, found in private archives and in the Archivo Histórico de Asturias, the Biblioteca Ramón Pérez de Ayala (Oviedo), the Archivo Municipal del Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz), the Biblioteca de la Facultad de Teología de Granada and the Real Academia de la Historia.