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Feb. 22nd, 2006 11:09 pmI just looked a gift horse in the mouth.
My big edition of chapbooks is really a big edition of frontispieces of chapbooks, without text for a bunch of them. It gives a brief history of each and says useful things like "similar to the 1660 version." I was so looking forward to doing the later versions of the things I had examined from earlier! I could do it anyway with a bit of clever webhunting, but it is rainy and tired tonight and I don't have the energy. It just bugged me that the absent editions are all the texts I was most interested in.
The good news is that my small modern edition of 6 chapbooks genuinely does have 6 texts.
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yasminke will be happy, because one of those six is "Valentine and Orson" which has a brazen head. In fact, this story has everything, including the Green Knight, Pepin and Feragus. Medieval genre collisions. The brazen head is post-Medieval but normally attached to real people (Bacon and Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, mostly). The Green Knight I only know from English language stuff (specifically Gawain and the Green Knight). Pepin is not only a French King (married to Berta Big Foot) but is from chansons de geste, and Feragus is sort of chanson de geste/romance overlap.
Given this melange, how is the little story introduced? Simply. No fanfare. Nice modern feel.
"Chapter 1.
In which the reader his informed how Lady Bellisant is delivered of Valentine and Orson, at one Birth, in a Wood.
History tells us that Pepin, king of France, had a fair sister named Bellisant.."
You know what strikes me most about this? It is very fairy-tale like. This fits. It is not that it was copying fairytales (no evidence of this!), but that our modern structure for fairytale openings often came from the shorter types of popular text. Straightforward narrative, couched as historical, but actually only very distantly so.
The other thing that strikes me is that the fairytale link is not just in the opening. By the eighteenth century, medieval courtly narrative and historical narrative and all sorts of other narrative (if it survived) had a different status. It was traditional and old and rather like the fairy tale in the need to remember it and recount it.
The other thing that is interesting is the total loss of anything to say "hear me." These were written documents from the moment they were composed - page one got audience attention simply by existing. That's why there is so little introductory matter, I think. Introductory matter would have taken up precious space that could better be occupied by pictures. The fact that the pictures were not always relevant to the text was unimportant - they were what helped sell the story in the way "Hear me" and "Sit right down" and "this is an old tale" did in the other texts I was looking at.
It's interesting that teller of the tale didn't feel the need to explain to us that these were old stories. Not a word of justification or explanation of why it is there. I wish I had the full 100-odd tales I thought I was getting, to find out how many of the other older stories have this cocky assumption of their claim to audience attention. It would be interesting, because the eighteenth century is when the modern novel was supposedly invented.
You know, I need to look at an introduction to an 18th century novel. Tomorrow, perhaps. It will be a random novel - whichever one falls off my bookshelf into my hands first. I suddenly have a need to know if novels also started without many preliminaries. How did they sell a big book that cost more than 1d?
Some of you write novels - how do you introduce things? And what happens with the multivoume variety of text? How do you ensure you have an audience initially? I mean consciously ensure it? I am suddenly very curious.
My big edition of chapbooks is really a big edition of frontispieces of chapbooks, without text for a bunch of them. It gives a brief history of each and says useful things like "similar to the 1660 version." I was so looking forward to doing the later versions of the things I had examined from earlier! I could do it anyway with a bit of clever webhunting, but it is rainy and tired tonight and I don't have the energy. It just bugged me that the absent editions are all the texts I was most interested in.
The good news is that my small modern edition of 6 chapbooks genuinely does have 6 texts.
yasminke will be happy, because one of those six is "Valentine and Orson" which has a brazen head. In fact, this story has everything, including the Green Knight, Pepin and Feragus. Medieval genre collisions. The brazen head is post-Medieval but normally attached to real people (Bacon and Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, mostly). The Green Knight I only know from English language stuff (specifically Gawain and the Green Knight). Pepin is not only a French King (married to Berta Big Foot) but is from chansons de geste, and Feragus is sort of chanson de geste/romance overlap.Given this melange, how is the little story introduced? Simply. No fanfare. Nice modern feel.
"Chapter 1.
In which the reader his informed how Lady Bellisant is delivered of Valentine and Orson, at one Birth, in a Wood.
History tells us that Pepin, king of France, had a fair sister named Bellisant.."
You know what strikes me most about this? It is very fairy-tale like. This fits. It is not that it was copying fairytales (no evidence of this!), but that our modern structure for fairytale openings often came from the shorter types of popular text. Straightforward narrative, couched as historical, but actually only very distantly so.
The other thing that strikes me is that the fairytale link is not just in the opening. By the eighteenth century, medieval courtly narrative and historical narrative and all sorts of other narrative (if it survived) had a different status. It was traditional and old and rather like the fairy tale in the need to remember it and recount it.
The other thing that is interesting is the total loss of anything to say "hear me." These were written documents from the moment they were composed - page one got audience attention simply by existing. That's why there is so little introductory matter, I think. Introductory matter would have taken up precious space that could better be occupied by pictures. The fact that the pictures were not always relevant to the text was unimportant - they were what helped sell the story in the way "Hear me" and "Sit right down" and "this is an old tale" did in the other texts I was looking at.
It's interesting that teller of the tale didn't feel the need to explain to us that these were old stories. Not a word of justification or explanation of why it is there. I wish I had the full 100-odd tales I thought I was getting, to find out how many of the other older stories have this cocky assumption of their claim to audience attention. It would be interesting, because the eighteenth century is when the modern novel was supposedly invented.
You know, I need to look at an introduction to an 18th century novel. Tomorrow, perhaps. It will be a random novel - whichever one falls off my bookshelf into my hands first. I suddenly have a need to know if novels also started without many preliminaries. How did they sell a big book that cost more than 1d?
Some of you write novels - how do you introduce things? And what happens with the multivoume variety of text? How do you ensure you have an audience initially? I mean consciously ensure it? I am suddenly very curious.