by Katie Sagal (Cornell College) As a scholar of literature and the history of science, I look at both form and content in my work on eighteenth-century scientific texts to understand how knowledge-formation occurred in lay populations and how scientific authority was constituted outside of professional settings. My first book, Botanical Entanglements, focuses particularly on... Continue Reading →
by Anne-Claire Michoux (University of Zurich) Mary Robinson as 'Perdita', attributed to John Hoppner (1758-1810), Chawton House Library. A celebrity in her lifetime, Mary Robinson (1757-1800) was an acclaimed actress, immortalised as ‘Perdita’ for her star role in The Winter’s Tale, as well as a prolific and increasingly radical poet, dramatist, novelist, and author of... Continue Reading →
by Rebecca Short (University of Oxford) When Louis-Antoine Caraccioli (1719-1802) came onto the French literary scene in the mid-eighteenth century, he made waves almost instantaneously. The author was, at least initially, an anti-philosophe: religious and somewhat reactionary, he staunchly opposed the Enlightenment ideals propagated by thinkers such as Voltaire.Like other anti-philosophes who preceded him, including... Continue Reading →
by Stephen Gregg (Bath Spa University) Gérard Genette’s theory of the paratext is usually applied to some form of manuscript or printed material, but why not digital material?[1] In this post I want to explore how we might think about paratextuality in the relation to Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Briefly, ECCO is an online database... Continue Reading →
by Alex Watson (Meiji University) Our contemporary world of digital communication and hypertext has inspired recent scholars to re-examine how the conventions of the printed book enable the transmission of meaning. Within this context, the humble footnote has achieved a new prominence. Although footnotes can be found in works published earlier, annotation not only became... Continue Reading →
by Seán Williams (University of Sheffield) Jean Paul Richter, by Heinrich Pfenninger (1798), Gleimhaus Museum der deutschen Aufklärung. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter was unusual among German authors around 1800 in being able to make a living from literature. Other canonical names, including the likes of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, also worked as librarians, statesmen, or... Continue Reading →
by Miriam Lahrsow (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) If you were lucky enough to obtain an early edition of Byron’s satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), you would soon realise that the volume not only contains more than a thousand lines of witty and vituperative poetry but also almost one hundred footnotes written by Byron... Continue Reading →
We are delighted that the Eighteenth-Century Paratext Research Network will be taking not one but two panels to the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) annual conference in January! It’s been a pleasure to organise both panels, and we’re very excited to learn more about the speakers and their research. The first panel will examine... Continue Reading →
Hi everyone! We’re very excited to announce the foundation of the Eighteenth-Century Paratext Research Network! Our aim is to bring together scholars with an interest in any aspect of eighteenth-century paratext – footnotes, epigraphs, titles, title-pages, indexes, contents lists, dedications, prefaces, images, image captions, chapter headings, the lot! If you’re working on paratext of any... Continue Reading →
Eighteenth-Century Paratext Research Network 