| “First Words: The Preface in English Literature,” defines the genre of the preface and argues that it is, above all, an occasional form in which the writer addresses a specific audience and thereby establishes an authorial voice. The first chapter opens with an overview of paratextual and genre criticism and then turns to the specific qualities of the authorial preface that distinguish it from related material, such as forewords, fictional prefaces, and epigraphs. Paratexts cannot be defined by their content, but only by their relationships to other texts.; The next three chapters each take as their subject one preface and its writer, focusing both on the preface's reception and the relationship of the preface to primary texts. The second chapter examines Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads, countering Coleridge's reading of it as a separate, theoretical document. This chapter focuses on Wordsworth's attempt, through a combination of sophisticated rhetoric and “rustic” subject matter, to define poetry as a way of knowing philosophical truths. The third chapter analyzes Henry James's strange preface to The Ambassadors , which downplays most traditional sources of narrative interest, such as plot, location, and character. This preface is not a transparent guide to the process of composition, but James's way of directing the reader towards a different kind of fiction: a drama of what he calls “precious distinctions,” in which the protagonist's (and by extension the reader's) visual perception leads directly to aesthetic revelation. The fourth chapter takes as its subject the relationship between Shaw's polemical preface to Man and Superman and the structure of this famously unperformable play. For Shaw, however, the problems lie not with the play, but with the audience. The preface to Man and Superman is not concerned with introducing the play, but with converting the individual reader to Shavian positions by setting them against the standard ideas of the day. The final chapter examines the interplay of authorship and authority in the prefaces to four nineteenth-century novels: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights , and Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. |
