911±¬ÁÏÍø

Some thirty years after the initial publication of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters in 1721, the author hinted at the presence of “a secret, and somehow unnoticed, chain” tying together this entertaining, insightful, yet disparate collection of fictional letters to and from two Persian travelers in France. In The Art of the Persian Letters Randolph Runyon takes the chain metaphor seriously, showing that the chain is not thematic but linguistic and structural, as each letter is linked to its neighbors on either side by echoing words and situations despite their different contexts. Montesquieu’s epistolary novel emerges as a delightfully self-referential work of art, full of hidden allusions to their persistently doubling structure.