Killing' her journal with delayed paratext? : Mary Shelley's journal intertitles and other distinctive features

Title: Killing' her journal with delayed paratext? : Mary Shelley's journal intertitles and other distinctive features
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2018, vol. 44, iss. 1, pp. [137]-151
Extent
[137]-151
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
 

Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.

Abstract(s)
One of the most fundamental, although unwritten, rules of diarising is that a diary should not be fiddled with after "the clock strikes midnight", as Philippe Lejeune puts it. A diarist's choice to enter paratext, particularly in the form of intertitles, into his/her self writing, seems to suggest a need for tighter structural controls over the text but also, to use words of Lejeune, it "kills" a journal through the violation of the said rule. All in all, journal intertitles and other forms of journal paratext are not very common, particularly in nineteenth-century women's self writing. If they can at all be found in a diary, what form do they assume? What function do they serve? What effects do they produce? I look at these issues in Mary Shelley's 1814–1844 Journal Books and ponder Lejeune's dictum that rereading and its consequence, i.e. rewriting, can kill a diary.
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