Epistolary genre and historical (Im)politeness: State of the art and critical reflection

Abstract

This paper aims at providing a methodological reflection on the advantages that epistolary documentation presents in studies of Historical Pragmatics of Spanish and, more specifically, in the study of historical (im)politeness. The paper includes a state of the art on historical (im)politeness research and a bibliographic review, which considers the most significant works published to date in the Spanish-speaking world. Moreover, we discuss some research lines that may be developed in the future for a broader and more complete knowledge of the subject.