Working With English: Special Issue:
‘The Romantic-period Footnote and Paratext’
edited by
Ourania Chatsiou,
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
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