Canone e contro-canone nel romanzo inglese del Settecento : il paratesto in Defoe e Sterne

Abstract

This essay focuses on the important, explicative and seductive role performed by paratextual elements in the 18th century English novel that addressed to an audience mainly composed of the rising middle class. Through an analytical reading of a series of title pages, first it investigates the narrative and proleptic strategies invented by Daniel Defoe and turned into the epochal canon; then it points out how that canon was later subverted and parodied in the paratext (as well as in the text) of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, a great and innovative writer who was to remain an isolated phenomenon until the beginning of the 20th century.