The Rhetoric of the Page

Abstract

This book explores blank space in early modern printed books; it addresses physical blank space (from missing words to vacant pages) as well as the concept of the blank. It is a book about typographical marks, readerly response, and editorial treatment. It is a story of the journey from incunabula to Google books, told through the signifiers of blank space: empty brackets, dashes, the et cetera, the asterisk. It is about the semiotics of print and about the social anthropology of reading. The book explores blank space as an extension of Elizabethan rhetoric with readers learning to interpret the mise-en-page as part of a text’s persuasive tactics. It looks at blanks as creators of both anxiety and of opportunity, showing how readers respond to what is not there and how writers come to anticipate that response. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter 1), the &c (Chapter 2) and the asterisk (Chapter 3). The Epilogue uncovers the rich metaphoric life of these textual phenomena and the ways in which Elizabethan printers experimented with typographical features as they considered how to turn plays into print.

Untimely Breathings inThe Rape of Lucrece

“…32. 14 Smith,'Prickly Characters',[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]esp. 27.…”

“…With regard to aposiopesis visually inscribed on the pages of early modern books (via blanks and '&c' for instance), Maguire has argued that it is 'a textual moment which gestures beyond the text … a textual embodiment of absence … which exists only in incompletion and interruption and breaking off'. 35 The aposiopesis in the six instances of 'he' is part of the visual rhetoric of the page (or the stanza) that according to Maguire 'is not about suspension but about extension, the co-production of meaning between text and reader'. 36 One way the reader might extend meaning on this occasion is via their own breathing: the quick exhalations of 'he, he,' render the stanza a reader's exercise in disordered breathing.…”