Narrative As Archive: Ethno-Historical Paratexts
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NARRATIVE AS ARCHIVE: ETHNO-HISTORICAL PARATEXTS IN BRITISH LITERATURE, 1760-1830 A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School At the University of Missouri In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By RUTH KNEZEVICH Noah Heringman, Dissertation Co-Supervisor Devoney Looser, Dissertation Co-Supervisor DECEMBER 2015 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled NARRATIVE AS ARCHIVE: ETHNO-HISTORICAL PARATEXTS IN BRITISH LITERATURE, 1760-1830 Presented by Ruth Knezevich, A candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Noah Heringman Devoney Looser Lily Gurton-Wachter Sean Franzel ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I extend my sincerest gratitude to the members of my doctoral committee, especially my co-chairs Noah Heringman and Devoney Looser. It is through their expert reading, patient listening, and relentless positivity that this dissertation has materialized. I thank them from the bottom of my heart for growing alongside me as I have grown into my role as a scholar. I am grateful for the financial assistance to pursue the archival research that propelled this project forward, especially the travel scholarships from Dr. John Bies and from Drs. Judith A. and Richard B. Schwartz and the fellowship funding from the Department of English. I thank Kelli Hansen and Alla Barbatola of MU Library’s Special Collections for their service in the early stages of my archival research, as well as the expertise of the librarians at the Bodleian Library and the National Library of Scotland. I also Angela Rehbein for a conversation at ASECS 2012 that led to this dissertation (as well as for offering the best advice on first entering grad school); Carol Bock for introducing me to Romanticism and challenging me to ask questions of the convergence of authorship and material history; and the late Joseph Maiolo for first introducing me to the idea of a career in literary criticism. Last, but certainly not least, I thank the members of my family. I could not have completed this dissertation—or completed much of anything in graduate school—without their unconditional love and support. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………… ii List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………… iv Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………….. v Introduction …………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter One: Annotations and Antiquarianism in Thomas Percy’s Five Pieces of Runic Poetry …………………………………………………………………………… 32 Chapter Two: Footnotes and Knowledge Work in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl …………………………………………………………………………………… 80 Chapter Three: Textual Imperialism in George Gordon, Lord Byron’s The Giaour …123 Chapter Four: The Pleasure of the Paratext in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner ……………………………….………….…… 160 Epilogue ……………………………………………………………………………… 196 Appendix …………………………………………………………………………… 209 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………… 227 Vita ………………………………………………………………………………… 246 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure I.1. “Edom O’ Gordon” in Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), pp. 99-100 ……………………………………………………… 6 Figure 1.1. MS Percy c7, fols. 9v-10r. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library .………… 51 Figure 1.2. MS Percy c7, fol. 11v. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library ……………… 53 Figure 1.3. MS Percy c7, fol. 26v. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library ……………… 63 Figure 2.1. “Account of the Bard of the Magilligans” in Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, fourth edition (London: Richard Phillips, 1808), pp. 97-98 ……… 81 Figure 2.2. “A round tower or anchorite retreat adjoining St. Boyne’s Cross” in Sylvester O’Halloran, An Introduction to the Study of the History and Antiquities of Ireland (1772), p. 213 ……….……………….………….……………… 97 Figure 2.3. “Plate XI. Tuagh Snaighte—Chip Axes” in Charles Vallancey, Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis, Vol. 4 (1784) .……….………….………….………… 100 Figure 2.4. “Plate VII. The Crotal, Corabasnas, or Cibbual” in Charles Vallancey, Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis, Vol. 4 (1784) …….………….….…… 101 Figure 2.5. “Plate V. The Harp of Brien Boromh and the Irish Crown” in Charles Vallancey, Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis, Vol. 4 (1784) …………… 103 Figure 2.6. “The harp of Brien Boirohm” in Joseph Cooper Walker, Historical Memoir of the Irish Bards (1786), p. 60 …………………………………………… 104 Figure 4.1. Title Page of James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) ………………………………………………… 183 Figure 4.2. Title Page of James Hogg, The Suicide’s Grave …….………….……… 186 v ABSTRACT Narrative as Archive contributes to the small-but-growing body of scholarship on paratexts—specifically footnotes—in imaginative literatures of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that these annotated literatures are Enlightenment-inspired, Foucauldian discursive sites (archives). These archives consist of collected ideas of human history catalogued through the annotations that de- and re- contextualize them into an imaginative record as a way to explore and come to terms with Britain’s past. To illustrate this claim, I wed archival research with media-historical readings of works by the antiquarian Thomas Percy, the Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), the poet Lord Byron, and the Scottish author James Hogg. I argue that the literary footnote offers these authors-as-editors a way to collect and curate textual artifacts into an imaginative record in order to explore and come to terms with the past. Narrative as Archive calls attention to the collapse of distinctions between author/editor, page/margin, poetry/prose. In sum, I argue that greater consideration to the material manifestations of knowledge work in these imaginative literatures can allow critics to navigate the division between form and content—and between media history and literary analysis—in the study of Enlightenment and Romantic-Era British Literature. This body of work offers an especially rich archive for exploration, in part because it initially was constructed as one. 1 — INTRODUCTION — “Books and the man I sing,” declares Alexander Pope in the opening lines of The Dunciad (1728). In the spirit of Pope’s bibliographic declaration in verse along with the text’s paratexts (its footnotes and footnotes upon footnotes), many writers sang, so to speak, about their books and their material and ethno-historical particularities through the apparatus of the footnote. Books, too, sang about themselves and called attention to their material properties by incorporating more and more paratextual materials with authorizing and editorial commentary, no matter what the genre—including fiction. And, with the advent of what Benedict Anderson describes as a “golden age of vernacularizing lexicographers, grammarians, philologists, and literateurs” (71) in the middle of the eighteenth century, footnotes became a hallmark of antiquarian and archival literatures for both Enlightenment and Romantic-era writers. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, paratexts became increasingly central in defining literary genres and shaping readers’ expectations of texts.1 This was an era with a distinctly “bibliographic imagination,” as Andrew Piper has suggested (5, 7), and this imagination was fueled by what Christina Lupton has termed “knowing books”: books aware of and playing upon their own materiality (7). Editors and authors acting as editors actively inserted their own voices into both original works and collections of traditional material with critical frames, prefaces, headnotes, footnotes, and endnotes: the antiquarian commentary that Thomas Gray included in the second editions 1 Paratexts include those apparatuses that enable “a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public” (Genette 1), such as title pages, prefaces, and footnotes. 2 of his odes “The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard” (1770), for instance; or the playful, mock-editorial preface of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), along with paratexts reflecting the actual editorial assistance of her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth; and the secondary, prose narrative of historical subjectivity woven by Charlotte Smith in her reflective notes to Beachy Head (1807). Some footnotes even threatened to overtake the text. In this dissertation, I turn my attention to the now-unsung apparatus of the footnote (along with its paratextual siblings, the headnote and endnote) in imaginative literatures. I argue here that such paratexts hold singular importance in literary history. Not only do they allow poetry and prose to transcend classifications of form and genre; they also shape the text in which they appear into a kind of museum, an archive of traditions, ideas, and verbal artifacts—an historical repository that is shaped to tell a story. Paratexts prevail especially within ballad collections, real or purported translations of traditional narratives, and historically informed novels. We can observe numerous footnotes and prefaces of a distinctly ethno-historical intent—of domesticating the other or of making the foreign seem familiar while retaining its distinct foreign-ness—that help to shape the text as a whole into a carefully curated archive. Paratexts thoroughly problematize ways we commonly perceive the role and voice of the author; with paratexts, the role of the author becomes inextricable from that of the editor and of reader as well. Put simply, paratexts