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Introduction: Reading from the Margins

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Summary

Annotation is a remarkably pervasive phenomenon in Romantic-period literature: from Lord Byron's attack on Lord Elgin in a footnote to Childe Harold (1811); to Sir Walter Scott's notes for the ‘Magnum Opus’ edition of the Waverley novels (1829–33). Footnotes and endnotes are a frequent presence in genres as varied as Anti-Jacobin satire, the Oriental poetic epic, the national tale and the historical novel, as well as Bibles, dictionaries, editions of literary classics, grammar books, literary oddities, parliamentary registers, plays, scientific literature and works of antiquarian scholarship.

Yet, as readers, we tend to disregard annotation. Noël Coward once compared reading a footnote to having to go downstairs to answer the doorbell, while making love. For many writers, footnotes and endnotes are an aesthetic evil of Gothic proportions: ‘a mask’, ‘a viper's nest’, ‘a tomb’, ‘an aberration’, ‘a fetish’ and ‘an excrescence’. Others insist that annotation should be excluded from scholarly consideration. The critic G. W. Bowerstock, for instance, asserts that ‘[t]he ordinary footnote … deserves no place in the annals of literature’.

However, over the past twenty years or so, the impact of digital technology and a growing interest in how readers – rather than writers – create meaning, has made scholars increasingly conscious that the meanings of texts are inseparable from their material manifestation. As a result, many have begun to investigate annotation in more detail.

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Romantic Marginality
Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page
, pp. 1 - 12
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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