Renaissance Paratexts

by Edited by Helen Smith , Louise Wilson

• ISBN13: 9780521117395
• ISBN10: 0521117399
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-06-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In his 1987 work Paratexts, the theorist Gèrard Genette established physical form as crucial to the production of meaning. Here, experts in early modern book history, materiality and rhetorical culture present a series of compelling explorations of the architecture of early modern books. The essays challenge and extend Genette's taxonomy, exploring the paratext as both a material and a conceptual category. Renaissance Paratexts takes a fresh look at neglected sites, from imprints to endings, and from running titles to printers' flowers. Contributors' accounts of the making and circulation of books open up questions of the marking of gender, the politics of translation, geographies of the text and the interplay between reading and seeing. As much a history of misreading as of interpretation, the collection provides novel perspectives on the technologies of reading and exposes the complexity of the playful, proliferating and self-aware paratexts of English Renaissance books.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Orders of the Book:

'Imprinted by Simeon such a signe': reading early modern imprints

'Intended to offenders': the running titles of early modern books

Changed opinion as to flowers

The beginning of 'The End': terminal paratext and the birth of print culture

Making Readers:

Editorial pledges in early modern dramatic paratexts

Status anxiety and English Renaissance translation

Playful paratexts: the front matter of Anthony Munday's Iberian Romance translations

'Signifying, but not sounding': gender and paratext in the complaint genre

Books and Users:

Unannotating Spenser

Reading the home: the case of The English Housewife

Pictures, places and spaces: Sidney, Wroth, Wilton House and the Songe de Poliphile

Afterword

Select bibliography

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