Eighteenth-century novels are full of lies and jokes. They bear false imprints and attributions; authors masquerade as editors; satires are veiled as documents; typographical signals, poems, songs, anecdotes, parables, sermons, philosophical commentary, pictorial vignettes, and unfinished tales interrupt the narrative. These appear not only within the text, but before, after, above, and below it in a riot of frontispieces, epigraphs, prefaces, tables of contents, dedicatory and admiring letters, interpolated tales, documents and reports, footnotes, glosses, chapter headings, songs, poems, inset tales, printers' ornaments and illustrations, and indexes. These paratexts divert readers' attention from the narrative to the text's documentary status: its authenticity and authority. Paratexts challenge the very possibility of representation by making textual transmission and the experience of fragmentation part of the process of reading the novel. Form qualifies content.

Editorial defense: Defoe and narrative authenticity

Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) establishes authenticity by purporting to be an autobiography. Like memoirs and eyewitness accounts, autobiographies claim to be literal truth, but a narrative's authenticity does not guarantee its morality. Moll Flanders meets the con.icting needs of didacticism and credibility with an elaborate preface that negotiates the rival claims of authenticity and morality, accuracy and art. The novel appears to be a transcription of Moll's own account of her life.

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, And during a Life of continu'd Variety, for Threescore Years, besides her childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, lived Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.