Preface

Prefaces

Prefaces; presented as a set of prefaces without a book to follow, this work is a satire on literary life in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, a lampoon of Danish Hegelianism, and a prefiguring of Kierkegaard's final collision with Danish Christendom. At the same time it tightly expresses themes characteristic of the entire authorship, including subjectivity and Christian devotion. Shortly after publishing Prefaces, Kierkegaard began to prepare Writing Samplers as a sequel. This next work considers the themes of Prefaces but in a yet more ironical and satirical vein. Writing Sampler remained among Kierkegaard's unpublished writings during his lifetime and appears here for the first time as Kierkegaard originally envisioned it, in the company of Prefaces.

The Preface

Building on insights from the fields of textual criticism, bibliography, narratology, authorship studies, and book history, The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century examines the role that prefaces played in the development of professional authorship in America. Many of the prefaces written by American writers in the twentieth century catalogue the shifting landscape of a more self-consciously professionalized trade, one fraught with tension and compromise, and influenced by evolving reading publics. With analyses of Willa Cather, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Toni Morrison, Ross K. Tangedal argues that writers used prefaces as a means of expanding and complicating authority over their work and, ultimately, as a way to write about their careers. Tangedal’s approach offers a new way of examining American writers in the evolving literary marketplace of the twentieth century.

Prefaces, The bee, essays, etc