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Based on what someone wrote earlier... wouldn't the notes to The Wasteland also be a paratext? They don't seem to explain anything, though they do suggest, among other things, that the lovemaking between the typist and the young man carbuncular would have been more meaningful if only they had read Goldsmith. David Zauhar On Thu, 27 Apr 2000, David E. Latane wrote: > Not to be too much of a pedant, but the gloss to the Ancient Mariner > functions quite differently from what we normally would consider "Notes." > It's best read I think as a paratext. Coleridge was very careful about the > appearance of the gloss on the page. If he'd wanted to make these "notes" > he would have done so, as poets routinely used notes in his era. > > Sometimes rather extensively. One of the amusing traditions of English > satire, coming out of the Dunciad Varioum, is the eating of the poem by > its own notes. Nabokov perhaps ends that line. > > Here's Holmes on the gloss: > > "One of the most striking things he did was to finalize the beautiful > prose gloss, or marginal commentary, to the 'Mariner'. For this he > invented another voice, standing outside his own creation, and so adding > another frame or level of meaning as he looked back on it. (It was the > device he used in his 'metafictional' letter in the _Biographia_.) This > time he adopted the voice of a learned antiquarian, a Christian > commentator from the seventeenth century, who seeks to interpret the > ballad like some mystical allegory of punichment and redemption." > > And so on, _Darker Visions_ 418ff. > > David Latane > [log in to unmask] > > %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%