Renaissance Paratexts - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521117399 ISBN 13: 9780521117395

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2011

Synopsis

In his 1987 work Paratexts, the theorist Gérard 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.

About this title

Book Description

Covering a wide range of texts, authors and genres, this collection takes a fresh look at the ways early modern books presented themselves to readers. Chapters provide novel perspectives on the technologies of reading and expose the complexity of the playful, proliferating and self-aware paratexts of English Renaissance books.

About the Author

Helen Smith is Lecturer in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature at the University of York. She has published widely on early modern textual culture and is currently completing a monograph, Grossly Material Things: Women and Textual Production in Early Modern England. She is Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, 'Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe'.

Louise Wilson is a Research Associate at the University of St Andrews, where she works on the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva, working on Lukas Erne's forthcoming Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Louise has published on the paratexts and readerships of romance, and is currently completing a monograph entitled Humanism and Chivalric Romance in Tudor England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0521117399
• ISBN 13: 9780521117395
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Smith Helen, Wilson Louise