In 1646, when the London theatres were closed, James Shirley published a collection titled Poems &c. Shirley’s et cetera included “Prologues and Epilogues Written to severall Playes Presented in this Kingdom, and else-where.” While the paratexts in this volume are for plays that had already been performed, Shirley’s Poems offers the first or only known publication for some prologues, for instance, for Shirley’s The Doubtful Heir (first published in 1652; also included in Six New Plays, 1653). This chapter explores how the dramatic epitexts in Shirley’s Poems make meaning without the full text of their play. Shirley reveals himself to be Ben Jonson’s heir and a poet-playwright in the classical tradition. These paratexts no longer frame plays; rather, they act as a threshold that opens into Shirley’s dramatic oeuvre and makes it the centerpiece of, to use Richard Helgerson’s term, Shirley’s “self-crowned laureateship.”

This chapter considers Francis Kirkman’s Restoration reprints of two anonymous Tudor plays, Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Tom Tyler and His Wife. I argue both the form and contents of these reprints underscore the antiquity of English drama at a moment of its resurrection. The playbooks’ respective paratextual apparatus and contents tether them to the distant cultural and political past, while also gesturing to the extensive dramatic tradition that emerged over the course of a century. Each edition refers to publications or performances “about” or “near a hundred years ago.” Appearing when Restoration drama was developing a new idiom and updating pre-1642 professional plays to suit contemporary tastes, these reprints are resolutely old-fashioned. This essay argues the 1661 reprints of Tudor drama illuminate Restoration drama’s complex negotiation of its dramatic inheritance, in which English drama’s value derives partly from its longevity.

It has often been said Barbara Strozzi’s dedication of each of her printed books of music to a different patron demonstrates her lack of success in finding stable support. A careful examination of the system of dedications leads to a different conclusion. The main function of a dedication was to obtain the gradimento, or appreciation, of the dedicatee for the gift of the book, which would be expressed, almost always, in financial terms, as a gift to the author of cash or valuables. In agreeing to this exchange, the dedicatee also gained a reputation as a patron of the arts, but even more so as an exemplar of generosity. Strozzi’s dedications, therefore, demonstrate success in obtaining the approval of a series of important patrons.

Chapter 2 juxtaposes the myth of proprietary authorship embodied in the legal idiom of ‘work’, ‘author’ and ‘originality’ with the realities of print production in late eighteenth-century Germany. I problematise the conventional view of the literary work as an intellectual creation of a personal author through a paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay that reconstructs its underpinning historical processes and conditions. This analysis includes not only the epitextual background of the German Enlightenment and the role therein played by periodicals such as the Berlinische Monatsschrift, but also the peritextual features of catchwords, signature marks and front matter that appeared within and alongside Kant’s text. I argue that these paratexts lead us back to the print machinery of the German Enlightenment: a socio-technological assemblage of human actors interacting with technologies, which Kant and others sought to steer so as to address the problem of print saturation. The existence of such a machinery, one that preceded the authorial figure, perturbs copyright law’s attachment to original authorship. Insufficient to deal with the complexities of the book’s emergence, the terms and doctrines of copyright law tend to suppress the deep historicity of literary production.

Here I consider ways in which Virgil’s text is supplemented by translators. These supplements can take the form of translating additional material and of adding paratextual, explanatory material. Notable supplements considered include the spurious incipit of the Aeneid, the poems of the Appendix Vergiliana and the Latin supplement to the Aeneid written by Maffeo Vegio in 1428 which provides a happy conclusion to the poem. The paratextual material I consider consists of translator’s prefaces, notes and comments, along with issues raised by the cover, the title page, the dedication and endorsements, the mise-en-page, headings and illustrations, whereby the translator and/or printer attempts to frame and direct the reader’s experience. The presence or absence of the Latin text en face and the kind of annotation supplied raise the question of the intended uses of the translations. The chapter closes with a study of Douglas’ assertion of authorial presence through his paratexts.

The Introduction sets out the main analytical framework to probe a transregional formation of Arabic learning. Building on a rich historiography of the Indian Ocean world and its various regions it formulates an approach to studying mobile manuscripts with a view to exploring the shared social and cultural histories of learned communities. It discusses ‘mobilities’ as the potential of manuscripts to move around and ‘histories of circulation’ as actualised or ‘enacted’ movement among scribes, readers, and owners of manuscripts. In particular, it engages with the concepts of ‘enactment’ to study social and cultural mobilities of manuscripts and ‘entanglement’ to plot these mobilities on a transoceanic field of Arabic learning. Arabic philology takes centre stage in this study and represents a diverse and many-sided field of Arabic learning. Manuscript collections which form the empirical basis of the research are delineated and discussed.

This chapter opens with a discussion of Pater’s repurposing of his ‘Romanticism’ essay as the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations, focusing on the consequences of the paratextual status of this piece in relation to the preceding essays in the volume. Turning to the conception of ‘romanticism’ advanced in the ‘Postscript’, the chapter explores Pater’s non-English examples of romantic writing and what they may tell us about his understanding of English literature and its study. It also touches on a number of responses to Pater’s work, some tacit and venerable, such as T. E. Hulme’s ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, others more avowed and recent, such as Angela Leighton’s appreciations of aspects of Pater’s style. At a number of points, it examines the verbal peculiarities of the Postscript, both to indicate its difference from the earlier ‘Romanticism’ essay and to bring out certain features of Pater’s habits of thinking. The chapter ends with a discussion of the aims of the coda Pater added to ‘Romanticism’ and with which he completed the ‘Postscript’ – and thereby, the whole of Appreciations.

This chapter analyses the material that precedes the chapter summaries and the main narrative of Gulliver’s Travels. It establishes that the purpose of the prefatory material, both verbal and visual, is to make the reader uncertain whether or not they are reading a true story. The purpose of that is to tease and vex the reader, with the broader satirical intention of calling into question the very concept of truth. Swift is pointing out that human beings are systematically perverting language so as to express intentionally untrue statements, chronic mendacity, and its destabilisation of the linguistic system being a manifestation of human corruption. The chapter examines political lying in the early eighteenth century, then literary lying in prose fiction, situating Gulliver as a critique of reader-credulity and ‘absorptive’ reading encouraged by novels. The chapter explains the aims of the text and its preliminaries in their 1726 and 1735 states.

This essay describes Bernardine Evaristo as exemplary of a cohort of contemporary writers who are self-consciously pushing the boundaries of content and form to amplify the voices and perspectives of marginalized persons. Laying out in a systematic way the features and goals of the multifocal decolonial novel, this article takes Evaristo’s Booker Prize–winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as a case study. We show that Evaristo uses a multifocal narrrative structure to distribute narrative attention and character space more or less equally among a large number of characters, even as she pays careful attention to the characters’ networks of interaction and affiliation. Such a narrative structure demonstrates that there are always multiple “worlds of sense” – or domains of intelligibility – that make up a shared social-natural world; they further effectively illustrate the ecological and interconnected nature of that world. In this way, multifocal narrative novels provincialize the so-called universal perspective without falling into epistemological or ontological relativism. Through the use of a multifocal narrative structure and the poetic technique of caesura, Evaristo deploys the resources of literary fiction to document an obscured Black British historical past while harnessing the imagination to reshape an understanding of that past.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which has appeared in more than four hundred editions, is one of the most enduring and widely available African American texts. More than three dozen editions of the book have appeared in print since 1990. The variety of editions includes an ever-expanding body of paratexts such as chronologies, notes, bibliographies, and study guides, which reveal the extent to which publishers, editors, and scholars continually redesign Douglass’s book for new generations of readers. Investigations of Narrative editions and paratexts enhance views of one of our most well-known writers and books.

Tracks Shakespeare's emergence as a print author, noting that his first publications were a pair of narrative poems which, though intended primarily to secure aristocratic patronage, proved to be singularly successful commercially. The earliest publication history of Shakespeare's individual plays is mapped in detail, with particular attention being given to the career of Thomas Millington, who, in effect, provided 'proof of concept' that Shakespeare publishing was a worthwhile venture. Andrew Wise's subsequent success in publishing Shakespeare titles is also noted. The fact that the plays were, initially, published anonymously is registered, as is the fact that many of the earliest editions offered significantly attenuated texts. Some speculation is offered as to the derivation of these shortened texts. The chapter notes that, by the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare was well established as a recognised print author as well as a successful playwright.

This chapter analyzes the recent popular television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, showing how serial storytelling has extended the social and political discussions begun by the novel. Specific attention is paid to the political implications of soundtrack and visual aesthetics, including the series’ allusions to painting, photography, and cinema, as well as costume, lighting, and choreography. The technique of alternating mass scenes, as in the Prayvaganza and the Particicution, overhead shots, and shallow focus close-up is considered. The visual impact of the Handmaids’ costumes extends to their widespread use in contemporary human rights demonstrations. Finally, the chapter reviews viewers’ responses both positive and negative, including concerns about the problematic “color-blindness” of the series. The debate around the series exposes the interdependence of aesthetic, intellectual, and moral categories that reflect a range of sociocultural preoccupations.

The Works of J. S, D. D, D. S. P. D., whose first four volumes were published by George Faulkner in Dublin under the date of 1735, was a landmark achievement for the Dublin trade and for Swift in print. These are volumes of considerable expressive force, owing in part to their generous use of frontispieces, ornaments and paratexts. This was the nearest thing to an authorised collected edition to appear in Swift’s lifetime. Although it is rightly regarded as a monument, and a significant step in the consolidation of Swift in print, it is clear from the proposal and the 1735 tranche of volumes that it was a radically – and expressively – compromised one.

London publication still held apparent advantages that Dublin could not reliably offer (legally secured copyrights, high-quality printwork, effective distribution and assistance from the established contacts of Swift’s London years). After the Drapier affair, there was a brief period when the Dublin-based Swift once more centred his publications in London, arguably to the benefit of Swift in print, though not in the end to the satisfaction of Swift himself. Now that Tooke was dead, Swift sold the copy of his Travels to his successor, Benjamin Motte the younger, and provided Pope with material for a joint set of London Miscellanies. Later, enraged by the selection and censorship they had exercised, Swift responded by conniving at the appearance of authorial revisions in Dublin reprints – even while entrusting Irish friends with more poems to carry to press in London.

Elena Rebollo-Cortés examines how the material features of Sylvia Plath’s final two books have played a key role in establishing a critical framework for the interpretation of her texts and in defining her posthumous identity as a writer. In the context of the publishing history and the literary afterlife of Plath’s works, Rebollo-Cortés shows us how the figure of Plath has been presented to readers through the visual and textual packaging of key editions of Ariel and The Bell Jar. These key works have had a wide readership and large presence in the literary market. Their editions have therefore played a major role in the creation and perpetuation of Plath’s identification with a tragic figure. This concentration on books as historical and material objects presupposes that editions are (sometimes overlooked) vehicles of meaning, revealing, for example, that editions of Ariel disclose how Plath has been portrayed as a Faber poet, a woman poet, or a myth, while editions of The Bell Jar have privileged biographical readings of the novel.