Of Travellers, Messengers and Foundlings – Fictionality, Authorship, and Textual Property in Thomas More’s Paratexts

Abstract

Paratexts have attracted increasing attention in recent scholarship as an especially privileged tool for managing the reception of a text in early print culture, and Thomas More was certainly an exceptionally versatile user of this strategic publishing device. Not only does he make ample use of conventional paratextual techniques such as prefaces, marginal glosses and commendatory poems, he also takes the medium one step further by making his paratexts part of the narrative setting of his works, especially in the literary dialogues. In creating a plethora of (semi-)fictional voices and contexts, he effectively blurs the line between text and context, fact and fiction, and author and editor/printer. While this textual game of hide-and-seek has been extensively studied in Utopia and has often been seen as a typically ‘humanist’ feature of the text, the present article explores similar techniques throughout More’s work, thus overcoming the alleged rift between his pre- and post-reformation writings.