A Study of Paratextual Life Writing in English Poetry Books, 1598 to 1806

Love the author, and me for bringing you acquainted writes John Marriot in his epistle The Booke-Seller to the Reader, prefixed to Robert Gomersalls Poems in 1633, after having provided rudimentary information on the author. Gomersalls Poems were published in a period for which historians of the English biography have perceived a lack of biographies of writers, especially poets. However, while there is a scarcity of fulllength biographies and prefatory lives of writers in the seventeenthcentury, information on poets lives is provided in the paratext of printpublished books. The importance of the paratext at the interface of authors and their work has been acknowledged by criticism and addressed in selective case studies, but a sustained exploration of the role of the paratext in life writing which traces generic conventions over a longer period of time, goes beyond selective case studies and does justice to the wealth of biographical paratextual material included in poetry books is still missing. This project offers a systematic diachronic study of what I shall call paratextual life writing. It examines more than 200 singleauthor poetry books published in England between the end of the sixteenth century, when the first life of an English author was prefixed to Speghts edition of Chaucers Works (1598), and the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the writer of the preface of The Poetical Works of the Late Mary Robinson (1806) found that no publication can be presented to the world, unembellished by a Life of the Author, []. The project aims to show that 1) the paratext of singleauthor poetry books, comprising title page, engraved portraits, dedications, epistles, commendatory poetry, etc. constitutes a form of multi perspective and multigeneric life writing; that 2) paratextual life writing provides a forum for critical discussion of the form and content of life writing; and that 3) paratextual life writing forges a close connection between the authors life and his or her work, which serves commercial as well as interpretive functions and is instrumental in establishing the person of the poet as prime source of interpretation. Drawing on theories from the proliferating fields of life writing studies and the study of paratexts and combining them methodologically with close reading, genre theory and the history of the book, this project will yield novel insights into the discursive (self)construction of life writers, poets, and the connection between poets and their work. It will further shed light on the commercial imperatives of the book market and bring into relief assumptions about poetic creation. By introducing the concepts of implicit and explicit intraparatextuality, a new set of critical tools for the analysis of paratexts of all time periods will be provided.

This project examined the biographical information provided in English poetry books published between the end of the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century. 'Paratext' refers to all the elements that accompany the text proper of a book, such as the title page, dedications, or prefaces. For all pieces of biographical information provided in the paratexts in various forms and by a variety of contributors, I have coined the term 'paratextual life writing'. The major outcome of this project is a monograph on paratextual life writing, the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the examination of this phenomenon over a longer time span and on the basis of a large corpus. In this project, the paratexts of more than 600 single-author poetry books were examined. It was shown that 1) the paratext of single-author poetry books, comprising title page, engraved portraits, dedications, epistles, commendatory poetry, etc. constitutes a form of multiperspective and multigeneric life writing; that 2) paratextual life writing provides a forum for critical discussion of the form and content of life writing; and that 3) paratextual life writing forges a close connection between the authors life and his or her work, which serves commercial as well as interpretive functions and is instrumental for establishing the person of the poet as prime source of interpretation. It was shown that not only those poets who still form part of the literary canon today were given detailed paratextual introductions, but that also authors who are no longer well-known today were presented to their potential readers in considerable biographical detail. The inclusion of biographical information on a poet developed into a popular marketing strategy in the course of the two centuries examined in this project. The exploration of paratextual life writing has led to the insight that this form of life writing was not exclusively characterized by formulaic generic strategies, as had hitherto been assumed, but enabled innovations in the realm of the biographical presentations of authors in the context of their works. The role of booksellers (whose voice is often included within paratexts) was identified as central for the development of paratextual life writing.