Description
Book SynopsisFirst Pages proves the power of the title to connect the reader to the thematic, cultural, and literary context of the writing as a whole. Much like a facade to a building, the title page serves as the frontispiece of literature, a sign that offers perspective and demands interpretation.
Trade Review“Professor Maiorino’s First Pages, sparkling with witty aperçus, offers the first systematic and genuinely comparative study of ‘titology’ in literature. Proceeding from the thesis that the title is ‘the seed that contains the tree,’ the sophisticated work provides both theory and practice of its fascinating topic, taking representative examples from the Renaissance to the present. The reader will never again look at a literary title with the same innocence as before.”
—Theodore Ziolkowski,Princeton University
“Professor Maiorino’s First Pages, sparkling with witty aperçus, offers the first systematic and genuinely comparative study of ‘titology’ in literature. . . . The reader will never again look at a literary title with the same innocence as before.”
—Theodore Ziolkowski,Princeton University
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Frontispiece of Literature
Modern
1. At the Top of the Page and Below the Frame: Arcadia, Concert Champêtre, and Pastoral Titles
2. The Title’s Novelistic Birthmark: La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y sus fortunas y adversidades
3. From Title to Genre: Essaying at the Threshold of Form
Modernist
4. Title Translated into Title: Ulysses
5. The Waste Land: The Archaeology of Titles
6. Off the Page and onto the Stage: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore
7. Between Expectation and Explanation: Waiting for Godot
8. The Dustbin of Titles: From “The Literature of Exhaustion” to “The Literature of Replenishment”
Postmodern
9. “La biblioteca de Babel”: The Archititle in a Library of Titles
10. Cervantine First Pages: The Inadequacies of Retitling
11. The Picaresque and the Quixotic: An Adventure in Titology
12. Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore: Et cetera, Et cetera
13. After the End of Art: The Obituary of Titles
14 The Literature of Titles
Notes
Index
