ABSTRACT
Gérard Genette writes that every literary work extends beyond the author's original statement through embedded materials he calls “paratext;” a book's binding, format, typesetting, title page, title, dedication, publishing notices, prefaces, notes, and other textual interactions are codes that create
a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that—whether well or poorly understood and achieved—is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it
(more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies). 1 In a periodical, paratext may include such elements as editorial opinion, letters to the editor, advertising, adjacent feature articles, other authors and their previous contributions, and reportage of news events. When an author publishes a poem in a periodical, its pertinence relates less to the “author and his allies” than to the author's integration with the periodical as cooperative cultural commodities. Thus traditional discussions of aesthetics in Tennyson's poetry inadequately inform our understanding of his role in Victorian literature and society without considerations of the poems that appeared in periodicals and the historical contexts within which they work.