Les préliminaires textuels de Robert Browning

From his first poems onwards, Browning displayed a great interest in paratextual strategies—« from title page to closing line », as is said in his poem « Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis » (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845). Indeed, this peripheral zone or textual threshold is very important: it settles...

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Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Pubblicato in:URI:https://journals.openedition.org/cve,
Autore principale: Tholoniat, Yann
Natura: Article ou chapitre numérique
Lingua:Français
Pubblicazione: Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 2023
Accesso online:Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Descrizione
Riassunto:From his first poems onwards, Browning displayed a great interest in paratextual strategies—« from title page to closing line », as is said in his poem « Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis » (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845). Indeed, this peripheral zone or textual threshold is very important: it settles a pact between the poet and his reader and testifies to the author’s control over his text. In the paratext—and especially in the titles, subtitles and epigraphs—Browning’s endeavour is twofold: the poet teases the reader and he tries to channel or rather tune up the speaker’s voice by means of various combinations of a number of paratextual elements. Hence, Browning’s paratexts appear clearly as the place where a dialogue between the reader and the poet is to be heard, and as the necessary preliminaries enabling Browning to endow each speaker with identifiable inflections.