This chapter investigates first encounters with e-books and the processes by which readers evaluate a given work. Drawing on Genette’s theories of paratext and Drucker’s of performative materiality, it examines how trust is established and legitimacy constituted in practice, considering realness and bookness in terms of a given e-book’s status as cultural product and cultural object, and the ways in which e-book legitimacy can hinge on relationship to a print edition or to traditional mainstream publishing. It analyses readers’ rationale of realness on the theme of equivalence, contrasting conceptions of an e-book as real because ‘bits and ink – there’s no difference’ and unreal because they are ‘not the same product’. Finally, it considers the digital proxy and the ersatz book as two discrete types of e-book unrealness.

In the 1980s, a theoretical turn in African American literary criticism helped institutionalize the study of African American literature by insisting on its formal complexity and distinctiveness. The racial text could no longer be read as reducible to its social context. In that same decade, a materialist line of inquiry sought to reconcile formal and contextual analysis by examining the ways black-authored books were published by major companies and received by the critical establishment. Drawing on methods from book history and print culture studies, a sociology of African American literature developed as the academic field of study took shape around canon-building projects. Two approaches to African American literary sociology emerged out of the 1990s: skepticism about the book’s capacity to represent racial experience, and optimism about the commercial success of diverse authors. Over time, these approaches merged into general studies of the racial text’s shifting status in the literary marketplace. With that expanded focus, the sociology of African American literature today sheds light on the way culture and commerce intersect in the making, selling, and reading of black-authored books.

This chapter explores Byron’s reception through the lens of the Byronic sense of occasion. Focusing on the history of Byron’s contemporary reception, it argues that Byronic reception involves a transformed scene of reading and writing, and a transformed temporality, which is acutely attuned to a sense of occasion, stretching the moment of reception and production across a longue durée. It is a critical commonplace that Byron’s writing is about its own creation and production, but it is also about its reception. The story of Byron’s reception also tells us about the changing practices of Romantic criticism and culture more broadly. The Byron phenomenon taught its contemporaries to think of the poem as a performance, an event, an experience. It is also a kind of entourage. In this transformed scene of reading and writing, the text’s reception – always already anticipated – forms part of the entourage. The chapter examines how Byron’s works contribute to this sustained sense of the text as entourage, event, and public occasion – in furious conversation with its own past, present, and future audiences.

This chapter examines life writing in comics through the influential zine King-Cat Comics and Stories, created and independently self-published by John Porcellino since 1989. The various forms of expression employed in King-Cat generate a kind of unmediated directness between Porcellino and the reader, where the mode of address, tone, and style is constantly modulating. King-Cat is a form of life writing that uses the zine format and, in this case, comics featured within the zine, to foreground its aporetic nature. Constantly making the reader switch gears between different kinds of information in different forms, King-Cat makes the aporetic experience almost second nature for the reader. The intra- and intertextual dynamics created by Porcellino’s life writing practice implicate the reader in an animistic medium of uncertainty, where what the text “asks” of the reader shifts in register even in sections of the same page. This kind of reading process challenges traditional linear notions of time and suspends the location of identity within a text, thus suggesting a dynamic communal vision for life writing and, perhaps, for viewing life itself.

This chapter focuses on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) to explore Forster’s repeated, if sometimes reluctant, interest in modes of animality that threaten to unravel his humanism and complicate what critics, most notably Edward Said, have claimed to be his orientalising descriptions of the country and its people. It begins by looking at Forster’s depiction of beetles and wasps in the novel, examining how his later paratextual notes, added in 1942, undercut taxonomic precision. When placed in the context of the rise in popular entomology, Forster’s ‘unentomological’ approach to insects emerges as an important aesthetic feature of the novel. In part, it signals Forster’s hesitancy to impose western systems of knowledge on India, while it also differentiates his use of beastly language from writings by René Maran and Mulk Raj Anand. Bringing in intertextual material from Forster’s earlier novel Howards End (1910) and later account of visits to India, The Hill of Devi (1953), the chapter goes on to explore how he stages encounters with vaguely understood animal figures in which his anti-imperialism becomes, ironically, clearer.

In the famous 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace called himself “an exhibitionist who wants to hide.” It’s a quote that many Wallace scholars and fans can throw out at a moment’s notice as an example of Wallace’s endearing, self-deprecating wit. However, as self-effacing as that comment may seem, it nevertheless suggests concealment, contradiction, perhaps even deceit. For every aspect of Wallace on display, another remains hidden from view. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way he constructs his biography in his writing. Through carefully selected details and statements in fiction, essays and especially interviews, Wallace crafts a literary and public persona that is very much at odds with (or a heavily curated version of) his actual life. Much of the backlash against Wallace and the various debates over whether he ought to be studied, taught, respected or outright canceled stem from the disconnect between the biography presented to his readership and the actual human who has emerged in subsequent biographies, memoirs, testimonials, archives and tweets that have made writing about Wallace a cottage industry in publishing.

As much as these paratexts may appear to carry more authority as more accurate depictions of the “real” Wallace, it is important to examine how these accounts are themselves constructed versions of Wallace grappling with Wallace’s (and at times the author’s own) place in a rapidly shifting literary and media culture. Discussion of the many constructed biographies of David Foster Wallace, including the likes of D. T. Max, David Lipsky, Mary Karr, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and more, would show how much literary culture has changed in the decade since his death and show how much David Foster Wallace is a distinct product of his own time and place. Wallace and Franzen may have believed that writers such as Pynchon and DeLillo had an easier, less public literary life than they did because “they made their bones in a different time,” but the past decade has shown that Wallace made his bones in a different time as well, to the extent that he would not have been able to craft such a persona free from public scrutiny (or the truth) today. In this regard, Wallace may truly be the last of his kind, part of an extinct breed: the last white male writer of the twentieth century, the greatest, male-est narcissist.

Paratexts of all kinds became more significant as antiquity wore on. The Homeric epics, for example, and Herodotus’ Histories were not originally divided into books; the canonical book divisions were made only in the Hellenistic period. Despite evidence for the spread of paratexts, editors and scholars often ignore them. They do so, in part, because paratexts are inherently unstable texts; and yet, as ephemeral products of their own literary culture, paratexts provide precious evidence for how poetry was read at any given time or place. The first goal of this chapter is to the collate evidence for section headings, illustrations, and prefaces being produced for poetic texts in the East and West in Late Antiquity in Latin and in Greek. The second goal is to compare their use in each tradition and to analyze where the cultures either converged or departed in their use of paratexts. The evidence collated reveals that new paratextual forms appear around the same time in Greek and Latin, but that there are also separate developments in each tradition.

This chapter examines what is arguably Cavendish’s most famous publication, her proto-science fiction novel The Blazing World, from a textual bibliographical perspective, for the purpose of showing that textual bibliography and more traditional literary interpretive analysis can and should be brought together in Cavendish studies. The printed volume in which Cavendish’s novel was originally published, the 1666 collection, printed in London, includes both a treatise and the novel together. I establish a collation formula for this book, and examine the binding, signature marks, pagination, running titles, and systematic hand corrections. These textual bibliographical details demonstrate that the original intention was for Blazing World to end with what we now call Part I, and that Part II was hastily sent to the printer after Part I and the Epilogue had already been printed as a completed whole. The essay ends by showing how this bibliographical fact might change our reading of the narrative itself, and might also prompt us to ask new questions of Cavendish’s writing methods.

This chapter sketches out some ways translation aids the circulation of crime fiction across cultures and literary systems, with examples from the early twentieth century and from more recent times. The importance of setting and ‘local colour’ is examined as a key factor in the popularity of certain writers and traditions across international borders, as are editorial and publishing decisions relating to such paratextual elements as titles, cover images and blurbs. One historical example comes from Mondadori’s series of gialli, which was enormously successful in Italy from the 1930s on and which included many translated texts. These works went on to influence local writers, resulting in the importation and adaptation of certain subgenres and tropes. A case study of translations into English of the enormously successful Montalbano novels of Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri provides the opportunity to investigate the kinds of choices translators and publishers make in preparing a text for a new audience and market. The analysis looks at the translation of dialect and non-standard language, culture-specific political and historical content and the value of translators’ notes.

The Introduction explains why the early modern history play needs to be reappraised through an examination of publishers and the publication process. It opens by considering the problems of author-centric approaches that tend to discuss Shakespeare’s English histories to the exclusion of other plays, dramatists, and agents of production. It shows how ideas of ‘history’ and performed ‘histories’ were defined, debated, and interpreted during the period. This evidence demands an approach to the history play that is alert to the participation of different individuals in constructing the genre. The second half of the Introduction directs attention towards the transmission of plays from stage to page and proposes that publication agents have actively controlled and shaped the printed history play through two interlinked agendas, which feature throughout the book: strategies of selection (seen through print contexts) and strategies of presentation (seen through print paratexts). Finally, the Introduction considers the origins of these print strategies in non-commercial and pre-playhouse drama and offers a short case study on the Inns of Court play Gorboduc.

Chapter 9 focuses on paratext from the eighteenth century to Victorian novels, highlighting the revival of omniscience in twenty-first-century storytelling before taking a technological leap to hypertext. Building on theories put forward by specialists of the field, it shows to what extent the notion of ‘interactivity’ and the reader’s higher implication in the creative process in digital fiction as opposed to print fiction need to be narratologically and pragmatically qualified. As the reader is strongly invited to (virtually) perform the action mentioned in the hyperlink by clicking on it if the story is to go on at all, the reference model (of Chapter 1) is tested and adapted to foreground the limits but also the potentialities of digital art. In response to Warhol’s distinction (1986, 1989, 1995) between ‘engaging’ and ‘distancing’ narrators, Chapter 9 also proposes a new model of implication in fiction, taking the perspective of actual readers. Given their degree of engagement and immersion in the narrative addressed to ‘you’, distinctions between ‘engaged’, ‘distanced’ and ‘immersed’ readers are suggested in a flexible model allowing for intermediate positioning.

This chapter takes the Meditations to act out the jam in autodiegetic biography, 1. through synkrisis with the SHA M. A., 2. through the programmatic/prelusory relations of M1 with 2-12. In representation reticulated through the diplomatics of first-person self-promotion, concentrated absenting delivers strongly motivated presencing. This is a book that wears its status as a book but wears it thin.

This chapter pursues a historical, methodological and theoretical agenda to interrogate the validity and value of identifying proto-novelistic writing in medieval French literature. Informed by Terence Cave’s reflections on ‘pre-liminaries’, it counters conventional positionings of the medieval period in histories of the novel in French, ensuring that it is not unduly omitted or disparaged whilst opposing unhelpfully evolutionary approaches. It first considers methodological challenges to adopting a fruitful retrospective gaze on medieval textuality, specifically problems of teleology and etymology. Focusing on the Old French roman and Middle French nouvelle as the genres most targeted as precursors in histories of the novel, it uncovers unexpected aspects of such points of comparison, especially in light of the modern novel’s and medieval romance’s shifting generic and formal histories. Selected elements of form (language, prose/verse, narrative structure, paratext) are examined to promote modern-medieval literary dialogue. A concluding case study of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century dit proposes a fresh approach to identifying what, in chronologically earlier texts, is beneficial to our thinking about the novel today, in terms of definitional boundaries, the literary representation of individual experience, and reflexivity – the ways storytelling reflects on its own modes and capacities of how to tell a tale.

Clement’s title, Stromateis, is his most explicit genre marker; it is a miscellanistic cliché, by which he positions his work squarely within the culture of Classical miscellany- making. Classical miscellanists often invented clever titles and drew attention to them; on the surface, Clement’s Stromateis appears to be, by contrast, dull and prosaic. On closer inspection, we find that he uses his sequence of titles creatively to guide his readers into a deepening relation to God. Protrepticus and Paedagogus become scripturally authorised ways of figuring the Lord as the one who is addressing the reader, while Clement as author oscillates between accompanying his readers and sharing the Lord’s voice. In the Stromateis,Clement emphasises that the title is a miscellanistic cliché and does not endeavour to discover it in Scripture, but that in itself turns out to have significance. His point is that what is strewn (διεστρωμένα) is strewn in the world more widely than in Scripture, and the work has its telos in something that lies beyond the words on the page.

This chapter examines the role of magical realism in the literary marketplace with regard to questions of aestheticism, commodification, escapism and exoticism. It draws on literary texts (Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under and Ali Shaw’s The Girl with Glass Feet) together with their paratexts (such as websites, author comments and interviews, publicity material and reviews) and argues that the appeal of magical realism as a commercial label must also be taken into account when we speak about the cultural work performed by this mode. This is not in order to evaluate and judge specific texts in comparison with others, but because readers and their predilections, and the appeal of what is often called 'fabulist narration' in the description of magical realist books, decisively influence the effect of magical realist literature.