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This wide-ranging and entertaining book explores blank space from incunabula to Google books. Blanks are a paradox--simultaneously nothing and something, gesturing to what was once there or might be there. They are also a creative opportunity for readers as well as writers: readers respond to what is not there and writers come to anticipate that response. Thus, blank space develops literary and ludic applications.
Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter One), marks of incompletion such as &c (Chapter Two), and the asterisk as a stand-in for things that cannot be said (Chapter Three). By looking at the early-modern page as a visual unit as well as a verbal unit, this volume shows how the relationship between textual layout and textual content is as productive for writers as it is for readers. Mise-en-page influences readers in the same way that rhetoric influences readers. It is thus possible to speak of 'the rhetoric of the page'.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: 'This page intentionally left blank'; or, the apophatic page
- 2: Et cetera / etcetera / andc; or, the aposiopetic page
- 3: The asterisk; or, the gnomic page
- Epilogue
- Works Cited
About the author
Laurie Maguire is Professor of Shakespeare at Oxford University and a Tutorial Fellow of Magdalen College. She is the author or co-author of ten books and fifty articles. She writes about Renaissance drama, classical reception, textual studies and medical humanities. She is a Trustee of Shakespeare's Globe. She was joint-winner of the 2014 Hoffman prize for her collaborative article with Emma Smith on Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Summary
A readable account of the book as an object: a history of the page as well as a history of the book. Drawing an arc from the medieval scriptorium to googlebooks, this volume shows the creative and playful opportunities blank spaces on the page afforded readers and writers.
Additional text
The lively nature of The Rhetoric of the Page, which packages thorough and impressively wide-ranging bibliographical research and theoretically rich ideas into an impressively engaging and readable volume.
Report
The lively nature of The Rhetoric of the Page, which packages thorough and impressively wide-ranging bibliographical research and theoretically rich ideas into an impressively engaging and readable volume. Anna Reynolds, The Spenser Review
