Description
Book SynopsisThis volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation. Contributors are Harriet Archer, Gilles Bertheau, Carlo Caruso, Jeroen De Keyser, Russell Ganim, Joseph Harris, Ian Johnson, Richard Maber, Martin McLaughlin, John O’Brien, Magdalena Ożarska, Federica Pich, Brian Richardson, Els Stronks, and Colin Thompson.
Trade Review"Its wide-ranging aspect is what makes this work thought provoking, demanding, and well worth the effort." Barbara A. Goodman, Clayton State University, in Seventeenth-Century News 78.1-2, pp. 59-63 "[a] splendid collection of essays on authorial self-commentary [...] The fertile insights and extensive bibliographies that mark every contribution to the volume make it required reading for historians of Renaissance and Reformation literature." William J. Kennedy, Cornell University, in Renaissance and Reformation 43.1, pp. 294-296
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on the Editor Notes on the Contributors Introduction Francesco Venturi 1 Alberti’s Commentarium to His First Literary Work: Self-Commentary as Self-Presentation in the Philodoxeos Martin McLaughlin 2 Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo’s Marginalia Jeroen De Keyser 3 Vernacular Self-Commentary during Medieval Early Modernity: Reginald Pecock and Gavin Douglas Ian Johnson 4 On the Threshold of Poems: a Paratextual Approach to the Narrative/Lyric Opposition in Italian Renaissance Poetry Federica Pich 5 Self-Commentary on Language in Sixteenth-Century Italian Prefatory Letters Brian Richardson 6 ‘All Outward and on Show’: Montaigne’s External Glosses John O’Brien 7 Companions in Folly: Genre and Poetic Practice in Five Elizabethan Anthologies Harriet Archer 8 The Journey of the Soul: The Prose Commentaries on His Own Poems by St John of the Cross Colin P. Thompson 9 Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Annotation and Self-Exegesis in La Ceppède Russell Ganim 10 Can a Poet be ‘Master of [his] owne Meaning’? George Chapman and the Paradoxes of Authorship Gilles Bertheau 11 Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators Joseph Harris 12 Self-Criticism, Self-Assessment, and Self-Affirmation: The Case of the (Young) Author in Early Modern Dutch Literature Els Stronks 13 Reading the Margins: The Uses of Authorial Side Glosses in Anna Stanisławska’s Transaction (1685) Magdalena Ożarska 14 Mockery and Erudition: Alessandro Tassoni’s Secchia rapita and Francesco Redi’s Bacco in Toscana Carlo Caruso Afterword Richard Maber Index Nominum
