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Melodrama Remediated: The Political Economy of Literary Database Paratexts
Abstract
This chapter reconsiders some tenets of Genette's insightful framework for analyzing paratexts, by examining the transformation of paratexts on one kind of published play—a cheaper, nineteenth-century, English-language “Acting Edition”—after remediation into digital form for new purposes: not for producing theatre, but for studying old drama. Invoking Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dion Boucicault plays as examples of general patterns, the author first fill in gaps in the inventory of print paratexts, delineating a species of theatrical paratext different from the literary paratexts spotlighted by Genette, that, together with the publisher's commercial communications, referred away from the single author or drama and rendered the publication into a hybrid literary-practical commodity. Moving to the twenty-first century, the chapter touches briefly on the pre-digital academic publishing formats, print anthologies and facsimile microform, which involved paratextual and market practices variously inherited by digital successors. While acknowledging the diverse array of digitized playbooks, the chapter concentrates on the proprietary database Literature Online produced by the Chadwyck-Healey division of a conglomerate corporation ProQuest, couching the remediated play paratexts within shifts in global capitalism. These for-profit paratexts partly reveal their political economy basis in fusion with the ideologies of the academic market and the materiality of their medium, including a new species of partly visible protocols that the author calls actuating marks. Overall, the chapter uses old melodrama to open new views of the performances of paratexts across textual media and embedded in political economy.
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