The last Renaissance Graduate Seminar of 2014/15 will take place next Tuesday 26 May:

Dr Lucy Razzall (Emmanuel College, Cambridge)                                                            ‘The other syde of the lefe’: Textual Surfaces in Early Modern England                                5.15pm GRO5 (note change of room)

Dr Lucy Razzall was an undergraduate and graduate student at Jesus College, Cambridge, and is now a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She works on early modern literature and material culture, especially the material text, and has been active in the Centre for Material Texts since its inception.

In his recent survey Surfaces: A History (University of California Press, 2013), historian Joseph A. Amato makes an enthusiastic gesture towards the category of textual surfaces, describing how ‘humanity came to embed itself in its scribble – to marry itself to what these epiphanic and wordy surfaces showed and said’ (p. 108). However, he spends little time reflecting on what he actually means by this, and frustratingly steers clear of any specific ‘wordy surfaces’. The word ‘surface’ has its origins in early modern England, and our pervasive opposition between ‘surface’ and ‘depth’ is evident from these beginnings. These terms have many implications for literary critics, and in this paper, I want to consider one of the first ‘wordy surfaces’ that an early modern reader of a printed text encounters: the title-page. Title-pages have received relatively little attention in early modern scholarship – usually considered the domain of bibliographers, their functions are often taken for granted. In this paper I will think about how title-pages work as different kinds of surface, and how they help readers to negotiate the other surfaces of the early modern material text. Bringing literary responses to these paratextual sites alongside a range of examples, I will argue that they are especially vibrant surfaces, at which the book is especially aware of the possibilities and limitations of its own form. They remind us that the page or ‘lefe’ is not merely a passive surface on which text is laid, challenge some of our preconceptions about the ‘superficial’, and tell us about how how paper, and the book itself, take their place in three-dimensional space.