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American Paratexts: Experimentation and Anxiety in the Early United States

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American Paratexts: Experimentation and Anxiety in the Early United States 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 adventuresome reading habits and declaring better reading and readers essential to America’s status in a transatlantic book sphere. That focus on addressivity transformed the tone and content of the early republic’s prose, bringing the viciousness of eighteenth-century coterie publishing into the emerging mass market world of nineteenth-century monthly and weekly periodicals. Incorporating and expanding beyond Gérard Genette’s definition of the paratext, this dissertation combines the detailed bibliographical work of book historians and material text scholars with the insights of those studying the development of American authorship. Paratexts have too often been ignored as marginal or ancillary: this dissertation notes that it is in paratexts that authors in the early United States tackled subjects as varied as poetic meter, historiographical bias, national literary responsibility and the racial prejudice of white publishing norms. In their aggressive engagement of readers, these paratexts demanded a level of reader metacognition that facilitated the transformation of nineteenth-century transatlantic print culture. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor Max Cavitch Second Advisor Amy Kaplan Third Advisor David Kazanjian Keywords paratext, transatlantic, John Neal, Washington Irving, periodical, William Wells Brown Subject Categories American Literature This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/441 AMERICAN PARATEXTS: EXPERIMENTATION AND ANXIETY IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES Joshua Kopperman Ratner A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2011 Supervisor of Dissertation Max Cavitch, Associate Professor of English _____________________________ Graduate Group Chairperson Paul K. Saint-Amour, Associate Professor of English ______________________ Dissertation Committee Max Cavitch, Associate Professor of English Amy Kaplan, Edward W. Kane Professor of English David Kazanjian, Associate Professor of English American Paratexts: Experimentation and Anxiety in the Early United States © 2011 Joshua Kopperman Ratner Acknowledgments I have been lucky to have Amy Kaplan and David Kazanjian as committee members and Max Cavitch as a committee chair. My committee challenged and coaxed me into improving the dissertation at every turn. I am particularly grateful to Max Cavitch for helping me see more clearly what it is that I really study and for showing me how to turn it into prose. I also thank Michael Gamer, who taught me to think like a scholar and whose practical, structural, and theoretical recommendations are everywhere in the dissertation. I know that I would not have finished the degree without his help. Joe Rezek’s knowledge about all matters transatlantic and his generosity in sharing the best paratexts when he found them enrich each chapter, as do the draft-by-draft recommendations from Jared Richman, Jill Shashaty, and Megan Walsh. Like these colleagues, Jarrett Anthony was a constant and careful reader, but in addition his confidence in my ideas buoyed me when my own faltered. We should all hope for such friends in and outside of academia. I also thank Jim Green at the Library Company and John Pollack at the UPenn Rare Book Library for enabling my curiosity about John Neal and other paratextualists. The Penn English Program in London graduate fellowship and a Mellon Literature and Material Texts fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies gave me the time to read and write and the benefit of great colleagues with whom to share work. For believing in my education and giving me every chance to further it, I thank my parents. Their support, in each and every meaningful sense of that word, gives me great comfort. Daniel sent pickled carrots and other delights from iii California, but I hope he knows what a gift it is to me that I can (and do) call him for advice and encouragement when I need it most. Hannah made sure that I got it done, even when she was on the other side of the world; for that and for everything else that matters, I thank her here. iv ABSTRACT AMERICAN PARATEXTS: EXPERIMENTATION AND ANXIETY IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES Joshua Kopperman Ratner Supervisor: Max Cavitch “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 adventuresome reading habits and declaring better reading and readers essential to America’s status in a transatlantic book sphere. That focus on addressivity transformed the tone and content of the early republic’s prose, bringing the viciousness of eighteenth-century coterie publishing into the emerging mass market world of nineteenth-century monthly and weekly periodicals— the world that Hawthorne rejected and William Wells Brown embraced. As these writers sought ways to participate in a transatlantic literary market, they used paratexts to announce their goals and ambitions as writers, but also to describe themselves as editors. v Incorporating and expanding beyond rard enette’s definition of the paratext, this dissertation combines the detailed bibliographical work of book historians and material text scholars with the insights of those studying the development of American authorship. Paratexts have too often been ignored as marginal or ancillary: this dissertation notes that it is in paratexts that authors in the early United States tackled subjects as varied as poetic meter, historiographical bias, national literary responsibility and the racial prejudice of white publishing norms. In their subject matter and in their aggressive engagement of readers, these paratexts demanded a level of reader metacognition that facilitated the transformation of nineteenth-century transatlantic print culture. vi Table of Contents Introduction “Postscript that should have been a preface”: Authorial Anxiety and Paratextual Experimentation in the American Early Republic 1 Chapter One: Irving Self-satisfied Citizens and Republican Reading in A History of New York 47 Chapter Two: Ingersoll Tennis on the Transatlantic Lawn 107 Chapter Three: Neal John Neal, Novelist as Journal Editor OR: How to Write a Blackwood Article in Five Easy Steps Novels 152 Chapter Four: Brown Done Brown but Not Used Up: Authoring and Editing in William Wells Brown’s Autobiographical Narratives and Clotel 192 Coda: Hawthorne “Seized by the Button” or the “Paradise of entle Readers”: Hawthorne’s Prefaces and the American Romance 232 Appendices 246 Works Cited 254 vii Introduction Introduction “Postscript that should have been a preface”: Authorial Anxiety and Paratextual Experimentation in the American Early Republic On the spine of a famous book from 1856 there are thirteen words and two names. Beneath the title Leaves of Grass and the name “Walt Whitman” there appears the briefest of reviews, from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Whitman’s self-promotion receives regular attention by scholars interested in the history of authorship, but he deserves greater recognition for his paratextual innovation. At the same time, while the renewed interest in book history and material text studies returns our attention to the physical details
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