Briefroman

Briefroman, a genre derived in Germany from Samuel Richardson's Pamela and J.-J. Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse. German epistolary novels fall into two categories. In the more frequent form all the letters are written by the same person, as in Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Hölderlin's Hyperion, and the anonymous Briefe die ihn nicht erreichten, . The second type, represented by J. T. Hermes's Sophiens Reise von Memel nach Sachsen and Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, employ more than one letter-writer, though the letters of the principal character predominate. Aristipp by Wieland, though it has some dialogue, in the main conforms to the second type. The epistolary novel was most popular in the second half of the 18th c.