Writing authentically? Children’s literary letter culture of the 18th century: Analogous to autobiographies and diaries, letters are also regarded as so-called first-person documents in which the self-perception and representation of the historical subject in his or her environment are expressed, at least if one assumes that letters are written messages from a person to an absent recipient. However, such a view does not take into account the genuine dual character of the letter as a historical-biographical document on the one hand and as a literary genre on the other. The lecture will therefore not focus on letters (by children), but rather on different forms of 18th-century children’s literary letter culture, i.e. letters in explicitly literary contexts which – for different reasons – make use of certain aesthetic-rhetorical strategies of real letters. A special focus will be placed on the writing scenes and processes that manifest themselves in these texts, which can by no means be categorised as epistolary novels, as is the case in general literature. In a further step, the actors involved in these texts will be analysed, particularly with regard to the strategies they use to stage authentic writing.