“I feare to prefixe to these few poems a long epistle”: Dedications, Addresses to the Reader and Generic Influences

Abstract

Because of its protean nature, paratextual material could be viewed as a category which combines items that have various generic characteristics, generally taking from other genres. The dedication and the address to the reader thus derive from the epistolary genre, though with editorial and formal adaptations that this article will study. But if paratexts have generic characteristics of their own, is it also possible to find a generic articulation between the main text and the paratext? Can we trace connections between the codes used in the genre of the main text and those used in the paratextual material? This article takes a corpus of sonnet collections as a case study to measure how the formal and thematic evolutions of a genre can influence the liminary pages.

Keywords

• paratext
• dedication
• address to the reader
• epistle
• sonnet
• communities of readers