British Library Paratexts
My research on Maria Polack and her novel, Fiction Without Romance, led to the discovery of two sets of paratexts, or the pages that frame and contextualize the novel, such as title pages, Prefaces, and conclusions. The British Library copy of Fiction Without Romance contains a different set of paratexts from every other known copy of the novel. My discovery of the British Library's unusual set of paratexts revealed important features of the novel's production and significant biographical information about the author.
Gérard Genette explains that "More than a boundary or sealed border, the paratext is rather a threshold, or. . . a 'vestibule' that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back. It is an 'undefined zone' between the inside and the outside" of the book.1 He adds, the paratexts create a zone of "transaction" whereby they exert "an influence on the public" aimed at "the service of a better reception for the text."2 We see this process at work by comparing the two different sets of paratexts included on this site: the British Library set and the set that appears in every other extant copy of the novel. The author's identity shifts dramatically from one set of paratexts to the other.
One paratext in particular--the subscription list in the British Library's copy--preserves evidence of the way Polack marketed and paid for the novel's production costs. As I explain in greater detail in The Archive's East End, Polack used subscription to raise funds for the printing costs. The list's record of her broad, trans-Atlantic audience preserves evidence of the intellectual reach of her work, while also attesting to the global dimensions of her East End community. I've used the identities of the subscribers as a key to subtle but important features of the novel's content.
Written on the eve of the abolition of slavery, the unusual paratexts in the British Library's copy of the novel evoke a silent archive of enslaved voices. See The Archive's East End for a full discussion of the significance of the subscription list in registering East End cultural production, Jewish global literary networks, and the silencing of enslaved voices and identities.
The version of the book reproduced on this site is not the British Library copy. It is, rather, a copy of the published version of the book, of which only six physical copies remain. However, the link beneath the following digitized volumes lead to a digital copy of the paratexts from the British Library's copy of Fiction Without Romance.
Fiction Without Romance, Vol. 1
Fiction Without Romance, Vol. 2
The British Library paratexts have been reproduced on this site courtesy of ©The British Library Board (1153.l.1, n.p.). They may not be reproduced or downloaded for any reason.
Notes
1. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Translated by Janet E. Lewin, Forward by Richard Macksey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1-2.
2. Genette, 2
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