| This dissertation examines literary prefaces of the Romantic era, their prevalent features and variations, the solutions they offered, and the problems they posed. It pays particular attention to the prefaces of William Wordsworth's 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, Walter Scott's Waverly, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Percy Shelley's The Cenci, and John Clare's Midsummer Cushion, concluding with a defense of Wordsworth's The Prelude as preface to Lyrical Ballads. It focuses on the various means Romantic era prefacers used to mediate the reading of the “main work” and on the success of those attempts, as measured by contemporary critical responses.; My approach, formalism, is cognizant of the evidence that form is no end in itself, separate from the “vision” or “matter” that informs it. In the Romantic period, each use of the preface as form had a unique dimension as well, one derived in response to its specific kairos, the context of its publication, a context that included text, author, and audience. Its innate flexibility may explain why Romantic era prefaces differ little from those of other periods: there was no need for significant mutation in a genre that bent so easily to the demands of the various cultures—literary, material, historical, socio-political—in which it was produced. The period did, however, create one significant variation, a type I call the “narrative preface.” Designed to obscure its attempts to influence the reader, the narrative preface—which focuses on process, not product—tells the story of its main work's origins, as in what may be the most famous example, the preface to Coleridge's “Kubla Khan.”; To ensure that these and other prefaces are accessible to readers, I have included them in the web page I constructed at http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/∼csmhp/. |
