Group blog
Our aim is to bring together scholars with an interest in any aspect of eighteenth-century paratext – footnotes, epigraphs, titles, title-pages, indexes, contents lists, dedications, prefaces, images, image captions, chapter headings, the lot! If you’re working on paratext of any kind and in any discipline, we’d love to hear from you and to invite you to join our network using the contact details on our webpage.
The Paratextual Framing of Felicia Hemans’ ‘Properzia Rossi’ (1828)
24 October 2023
by Hannah Moss Portrait of Felicia Hemans engraved by William Holl after William Edward West (1837). Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, NYPL Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) was a precocious...
Eighteenth-Century Botanical Paratext
29 September 2021
by Katie Sagal (Cornell College) As a scholar of literature and the history of science, I look at both form and content in my work on eighteenth-century scientific texts to understand...
Feminist Paratext in Mary Robinson’s ‘A Letter to the Women of England’ (1799)
27 May 2021
by Anne-Claire Michoux (University of Zurich) Mary Robinson as ‘Perdita’, attributed to John Hoppner (1758-1810), Chawton House Library. A celebrity in her lifetime, Mary...
Addressing the Absent Reader: the Dedicatory Epistles of Louis-Antoine Caraccioli
12 November 2020
by Rebecca Short (University of Oxford) When Louis-Antoine Caraccioli (1719-1802) came onto the French literary scene in the mid-eighteenth century, he made waves almost instantaneously....