Working With English: Special Issue:
'The Romantic-period Footnote and Paratext'
edited by Ourania Chatsiou, University of Wales, Swansea
CALL FOR PAPERS
The online, peer-reviewed journal Working with English: medieval and
modern language, literature and drama invites proposals for a
forthcoming special issue on 'The Romantic-period Footnote and Paratext.
This issue aims to give a snapshot of the prominence of the paratext in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literary culture.
Gerard Genette's Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation
(1987, trans.1997) and Anthony Grafton's The Footnote: A Curious History
(1997) announced the significance of paratext in modern literary
studies. Recent scholarship has also marked the re-emergence of
formalism in Romantic Studies, through various theoretical approaches
informed by deconstruction, new historicism, feminism and new
technology. This special issue will explore this renewed focus on
Romantic textuality, by re-introducing the paratext's significance and
relating it specifically to the study of the romantic text.
Since the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the
footnote replaced the gloss as an act of commentary, and evolved into a
subversive literary device conveying the highly ironic and satiric acts
of criticism of leading writers such as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope,
Laurence Sterne and Edward Gibbon. In the nineteenth century, the
paratext - assuming various forms such as the introductory
elaborative/theoretical preface, the footnote, endnote, marginal gloss,
and illuminated illustrations - continues to be a defining formal
aspect of the works of many canonical writers, such as William Blake,
William Beckford, Sir Walter Scott, S.T. Coleridge, Robert Southey, Lord
Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as of some currently
marginalised writers, such as Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, Walter
Savage Landor, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and John Cam Hobhouse.
The study of the paratext provides original analyses of
canonical texts, the ideas of nationalism and orientalist/imperialist
politics, the relationships between author/reader and form/text, as well
as a reassessment of neglected writers. Possible topics include: reading
audiences, reading practices, print culture, editorial history,
typography, illustrations, e.t.c. (this list is only suggestive and, by
no means, restrictive).
Please, submit a 350-word abstract (approx.) along with your
name, institutional affiliation, mailing and email addresses, telephone
numbers and a brief biography, by 15 November 2007. Send your proposal
by email attachment (in Microsoft Word format) to Ourania Chatsiou
([log in to unmask]).
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