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5 Paratext and prose The paratextual poetics that dominate Restoration prose fiction echoes in many ways the situation described in the previous chapter with respect to the theatre. In both generic contexts, the sudden and substantial rupture in the social and political sphere was followed by a period of active experimentation that was accompanied by an informal discussion. This discussion only rarely led to the kind of substantiated and complex debate of contrasting features within novelistic and romance writing that makes of the preface to Congreve
well as that of President Obama) all show these books being employed as relics from a glorified past, in whose authority those present wished to share. In late medieval England such Gospel books were becoming an archaic remnant. While they were used in liturgy and ritual, another type of Bible emerged. Adhering to a revolutionary paratext, these new full Bibles (or pandects) became a standard for Scripture, replicated in Bibles in manuscript and printed forms for centuries to come. A far cry from silver gilt and jewelled bindings of earlier texts, these were mundane
4 Paratext and drama Genres never exist in isolation, and it is probably more accurate to describe their attitude towards each other as one of competition. In the end, literary fashions and readerly preferences ebb and flow, withdrawing attention from one genre and endowing another with all-encompassing, yet passing, glory. Early modern drama certainly also followed these tendencies, with the overwhelming success of Elizabethan theatre standing in stark opposition to the decline of that genre by the beginning of the eighteenth century, interrupted by the
Chapter 9 Rethinking authorial reluctance in the paratexts to Anne Bradstreet’s poetry Patricia Pender A nne Bradstreet’s professions of inadequacy in much-anthologised poems such as ‘The author to her book’ and ‘The prologue’ make her exemplary of the modesty we have come to expect of early modern women writers. Her renditions of abject humility before literary tradition, her apparent objection to putting herself forward in print and her professed inability to complete the poetic projects she undertook have all helped to enshrine her as the quintessential
This article explores the rise of the Hollywood sequel in the 1970s and 1980s, analysing contemporary industrial and popular discourses surrounding the sequel, sequelisation, and film seriality. Drawing on recent sequel scholarship as well as a wide range of film examples and paratexts it examines how industry insiders, trade papers, and film critics tried to make sense of the burgeoning sequel trend. The ensuing discourses and cultural practices, this article argues, not only shaped the contexts of sequel production and reception at the time but also played into the movies‘ serialisation strategies and their increasingly self-referential manoeuvres.
In 1611 the King James Bible was printed with minimal annotations, as requested by King James. It was another of his attempts at political and religious reconciliation. Smaller, more affordable, versions quickly followed that competed with the highly popular and copiously annotated Bibles based on the 1560 Geneva version by the Marian exiles. By the nineteenth century the King James Bible had become very popular and innumerable editions were published, often with emendations, long prefaces, illustrations and, most importantly, copious annotations. Annotated King James Bibles appeared to offer the best of both the Reformation Geneva and King James Bible in a Victorian context, but they also reignited old controversies about the use and abuse of paratext. Amid the numerous competing versions stood a group of Victorian scholars, theologians and translators, who understood the need to reclaim the King James Bible through its Reformation heritage; they monumentalized it.
Novel horizons analyses how narrative prose fiction developed during the English Restoration. It argues that following the reopening of the theatres in 1660, generic changes within dramatic texts occasioned an intense debate within prologues and introductions. This discussion about the poetics of a genre was echoed in the paratextual material of prose fictions: in trans¬lators’ introductions, authorial prefaces, and other accompanying material. In the absence of an official poetics that defined prose fiction, paratexts ful¬filled this function and informed readers about the changing features of the budding genre. This study traces the piecemeal development of these generic boundaries and describes the generic competence of readers through the detailed analysis of paratexts and actual narrative prose fictions. Rather than trying to canonize individual Restoration novels, Novel horizons covers the surviving textual material widely, focusing on narrative prose fictions published between 1660 and 1710. Drawing on genre theories by Jacques Derrida and M.M. Bakhtin, the study follows an approach to genre that sees a textual corpus as an archive that projects into the future, thereby enabling later readers and writers to experiment with forms and themes. In addition to tracing the paratextual poetics of Restoration fiction, a substantial section of this book covers the state of the art of fiction-writing during the period. It discusses aspects such as character development, narrative point of view, and questions of fictionality and realism in order to describe how these features were first used in popular fiction at the time.
This book explores a new cultural moment in the history of the BBC TV series, Doctor Who: the casting of a female lead. Following the reveal that Jodie Whittaker would be the thirteenth Doctor, the series has been caught up in media and fan controversies – has it become ‘too political’? Has showrunner Chris Chibnall tampered disastrously with long-running continuity? And has the regendered thirteenth Doctor been represented differently from her predecessors? Analysing Whittaker’s era – up to and including Doctor Who’s responses to 2020’s first lockdown – this edited collection addresses how the show has been repositioned as a self-consciously inclusive brand. Featuring brand-new interview material with those working on-screen (series regular Mandip Gill and guest star Julie Hesmondhalgh) and those operating behind the scenes in crucial roles (Segun Akinola, composer of the current theme and incidental music), Doctor Who – New Dawn focuses on how the thirteenth Doctor’s era of spectacular TV has been created, and how it has diversified representations of queerness, race, and family. Moving beyond the television show itself, chapters also address fan responses to the thirteenth Doctor via memes, cosplay, and non-Anglophone translation. Finally, this collection looks at how the new ‘moment’ of Doctor Who has moved into gendered realms of merchandising, the commercial ‘experience economy’, and a paratextual neo-gift economy of Covid-19 lockdown reactions that were created by previous showrunners alongside Chris Chibnall. A vigorous new dawn for Doctor Who calls for rigorous new analysis – and the thirteen chapters gathered together here all respond adventurously to the call.
dramatic paratexts appear to both create and respond to a MUP_Smith_Printer.indd 201 02/04/2015 16:18 202 Aesthetic sensory experiences market desire for printed comedies as repositories of the type of erotic pleasure that antitheatricalists feared audiences would experience in the theatre. That such a motivation for playreading existed is confirmed by the early seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book of William Drummond of Hawthornden, which I discuss in my conclusion. Craik and Pollard point out that ‘early modern writers who discussed how it felt to
lower, or alternatively inner and outer, narratives, by way of text and paratext, or the authorial paraphernalia surrounding and enclosing the fictional narrative. Not as extensively annotated as either Castle Rackrent or The wild Irish girl, Melmoth the wanderer nevertheless contains several footnotes which vitally link fictional and factual narratives. Through these footnotes and other such