University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Fall 2011 American Paratexts: Experimentation and Anxiety in the Early United States Joshua Kopperman Ratner University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Ratner, Joshua Kopperman, "American Paratexts: Experimentation and Anxiety in the Early United States" (2011). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 441. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/441 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/441 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. American Paratexts: Experimentation and Anxiety in the Early United States Abstract “American Paratexts” argues that prefaces, dedications, footnotes, and postscripts were sites of aggressive courtship and manipulation of readers in early nineteenth-century American literature. In the paratexts of novels, poems, and periodicals, readers faced pedantic complaints about the literary marketplace, entreaties for purchases described as patriotic duty, and interpersonal spats couched in the language of selfless literary nationalism. Authors such as Washington Irving, John Neal, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Wells Brown turned paratexts into sites of instructional meta-commentary, using imperative and abusive reader-address to unsettle and then reorient American readers, simultaneously insulting them for insufficiently