| Emerging out of a culture of paratextual devices such as dedications and epistles, the appearance of the preface signals a shift in the literary marketplace from a patronage system to a system of booksellers and private readers. Through a diachronic study of the appearance, disappearances, and multiple reappearances of authorial prefaces to British and American novels of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, "Prefacing Fictions: A History of Prefaces to British and American Novels" defines a literary tradition of preface-writing. An analysis of the transactional dimension of the convergence of author, reader, critic, and publisher/bookseller leads to a fuller understanding of the novel itself and the institutional factors surrounding the history of the novel. Prefaces examined as evidence in this history must always be read circumstantially in their connection to particular texts within a particular historical context. And thus the scope of this study of the preface encompasses histories of the author, reader, and publishing.;This study begins with a delineation of an early Modern "prefatorial culture," which situated writers in distinct relationships with readers, patrons, critics, and booksellers. The following chapters examine how a variety of British and American novelists navigated this culture as it changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Henry Mackenzie hide or mask their prefaces, covertly courting or confounding the reader in order to establish their own authority in the literary sphere. Next, William Godwin, Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain variously engage with issues of an increasingly commodified literary marketplace and the transformation of the author into celebrity. Finally, Henry James and Ellen Glasgow attempt to capitalize on the preface's ability to fashion literary celebrity. |
