| This dissertation illuminates and examines the formal or paratextual elements employed by four 19th Century American female authors: Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton. It demonstrates the ways in which formal elements are as useful a tool to the literary critic as a traditional rhetorical analysis.Gerard Genette, in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, argues for the importance of paratextual elements, or "what enables a text to become a book and be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public" (1). Paratexts exist at the place where authorship and the literary marketplace intersect, and offer literary critics a way to use the formal features of a book as a point of entry for analysis. Paratextual studies are foundational, in that they reveal the formal features that lay the groundwork for content. |
