Overview

This volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation. Contributors are Harriet Archer, Gilles Bertheau, Carlo Caruso, Jeroen De Keyser, Russell Ganim, Joseph Harris, Ian Johnson, Richard Maber, Martin McLaughlin, John O’Brien, Magdalena Ożarska, Federica Pich, Brian Richardson, Els Stronks, and Colin Thompson.

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9789004346864

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""Its wide-ranging aspect is what makes this work thought provoking, demanding, and well worth the effort."" Barbara A. Goodman, Clayton State University, in Seventeenth-Century News 78.1-2, pp. 59-63 ""[a] splendid collection of essays on authorial self-commentary [...] The fertile insights and extensive bibliographies that mark every contribution to the volume make it required reading for historians of Renaissance and Reformation literature."" William J. Kennedy, Cornell University, in Renaissance and Reformation 43.1, pp. 294-296

Its wide-ranging aspect is what makes this work thought provoking, demanding, and well worth the effort. Barbara A. Goodman, Clayton State University, in Seventeenth-Century News 78.1-2, pp. 59-63 [a] splendid collection of essays on authorial self-commentary [...] The fertile insights and extensive bibliographies that mark every contribution to the volume make it required reading for historians of Renaissance and Reformation literature. William J. Kennedy, Cornell University, in Renaissance and Reformation 43.1, pp. 294-296

Author Information

Francesco Venturi, PhD (2012, University of Siena), is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Oslo. He has published widely in the field of early modern and twentieth-century literature and culture, including the monograph Genesi e storia della ‘trilogia’ di Andrea Zanzotto (ETS, 2016).

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