From Paratext to Epitext: Mapping the Authorial Apparatus in Early Modern Women's Writing

Abstract

Our focus on Early Modern Women's Writing and the Apparatus of Authorship in this special issue of Parergon responds to emerging trends in early modern women's studies that emphasize the importance of the material text to the literary, historical, and political analysis of women's works in the long early modern period. Attention to the material contexts of women's works is not new; it has, for instance, been a staple of the invaluable critical introductions to early modern women's texts that have been produced in the past thirty years. 1 However, it is also the case that, until relatively recently, such scholarship has remained something of a specialist concern, standing in paratexual relationship to the text proper, as an introduction to the work that follows. This relationship has been reinforced in criticism that considers the literary interpretation of early modern women's writing before, or outside of, its material and textual specificity. 2 If there has been something of a time lag in the material turn in early modern women's studies, this might be attributed, as Sarah C. E. Ross suggests in her introduction, to the field's initial focus 1 See, for instance, textual introductions to critical editions of better-known early modern women authors,

Recent approaches to paratext studies in eighteenth‐century literature

“…A special issue of the journal Parergon adopted this theme in 2012, exploring a range of paratexts and epitexts in women's writing across the early modern period, and thus placing analysis of early eighteenth‐century prefaces, dedications, and similar material within a chronological continuum of development. Commenting within this issue, Pender and Smith (2012) determine that such analysis functions to ‘locat[e] women's texts within their specific networks’ and thus ‘militates against uniform constructions of gendered effects’. The use of paratexts by women writers is further investigated by Knezevich (2016) and Breashears (2016), the latter of whom likewise examines various features including title‐page details, dedications, subscriptions and prefatory essays.…”