ABSTRACT
Why Curll, of all people? A natural reaction to the title of this essay might be to wonder what the rascally publisher Edmund Curll has to do with narratology, the theme of this volume. It might be thought that Curll (1683-1747) was an interesting fellow, no doubt, but scarcely a pioneer of writerly innovation. The case I shall try to make here is that Curll’s most characteristic productions, above all the instant biographies he brought out in the late 1720s and early 1730s, do tell us something about paratext – specifically on the way it constitutes a type of narrative statement – and may even exemplify changes in the shape of biography. In the limited space available, I can only point to a few salient features of his method, such as it was, and provide some empirical instances.
