Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins

Patrick Spedding · Paul Tankard

Mac 2021 · Springer Nature

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Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins offers an account of literary marginalia based on original research from a range of unique archival sources, from mid-16th-century France to early 20th-century Tasmania. Chapters examine marginal commentary from 17th-century China, 18th-century Britain, and 19th-century America, investigating the reputations, as reflected by attentive readers, of He Zhou, Pierre Bayle, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Warton, and Sir Walter Scott. The marginal writers include Jacques Gohory, Mary Astell, Hester Thrale, Herman Melville, the young daughters of the Broome family in Gloucestershire, and the patrons of the library of the Huon Mechanics’ Institute, Tasmania. Though marginalia is often proscribed and frequently hidden or overlooked, the collection reveals the enduring power of marginalia, concluding with studies of the ethics of annotation and the resurrected life of marginalia in digital environments.

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Patrick Spedding is Head of Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia, and Associate Director of the Centre for the Book. His current research focuses on book ownership, marginalia, and reading practices in the 18th century—especially among the readers of Eliza Haywood—and the publication, distribution, and survival of 18th-century erotica. He is the author of A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004), and the editor of many historical literary texts.

Paul Tankard teaches and researches in English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His chief scholarly interests are Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, the Inklings, paratextuality, and the future of literacy. In 2017 his pioneering edition of Boswell’s journalism, Facts and Inventions, won the Bibliographical Society of America’s Mitchell Prize. He teaches writing and fantasy (particularly Tolkien and C.S Lewis) and edits the Johnson Society ofAustralia Papers.