We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,544,714.19 | Books Available: 800,461 | Members Online: 37

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes

The Devil's Details A History of Footnotes
Author: Chuck Zerby

Footnotes, in The Devil's Details, are people, characters, heroes, and sexual beings. These heroes' adventures are followed from the early years of struggle in the seventeenth century through their triumphant dominance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and scholarship, to the harsh, undeserved belittlement they have received in th... more »e twentieth century. The Devil's Details ends with twenty-first-century footnotes facing a new world of Internet and hypertext, and makes a clarion call to preserve footnotes from the black hole of virtual reality. This is the first book to examine footnotes in their less buttoned-down incarnations as well as their traditional ones: scholars have employed them, of course, but also poets, novelists, memorialists, and pornographers. The Devil's Details is full of surprises. It hunts down the first genuine, fully functioning footnote (in the early sixteenth century), and makes bold speculations as it pieces together a rough scenario of the first genuinely dramatic use of a footnote, an annotation in a seventeenth-century poem by England's first female poet. A multivolume history of Northumberland County (England) that uses one entire volume for a single footnote is located. Footnotes to footnotes to footnotes are peered at as if they were receding images in mirrors; extraordinarily frank discussions of sex and finances are uncovered, and a murder plot, perhaps occasioned by a scholarly dispute, is recorded. Carefully researched and strongly opinionated, The Devil's Details is bound to be as controversial as it is entertaining. The history of the footnote has a marvelous plot with eccentric heroes and black-hearted villains, and the rogues' gallery of figures who play parts in The Devil's Details includes Alexander Pope, Herman Melville, Captain Richard Burton, Edward Gibbon, Norman Mailer, Hilaire Belloc, John Updike, Martin Amis, and Dave Eggers. Scholars, Ph.D. candidates, and lovers of the book everywhere will find in The Devil's Details that delight in reading can come in unexpected places-even right at the bottom of the page. Chuck Zerby developed The Devil's Details from an article he originally published in the New York Times. A former columnist for the Amherst Record and former dean of campus and director of admissions, Zerby lives in Hadley, Massachusetts.

ISBN-13: 9781931229050
ISBN-10: 1931229058
Publication Date: 10/2001
Pages: 192
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Invisible Cities Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> Books & Reading >> Reference
Literature & Fiction >> History & Criticism >> Criticism & Theory >> General
Reference >> Publishing & Books >> Bibliographies & Indexes >> History
Reference >> Publishing & Books >> Bibliographies & Indexes >> Literature

Back to the Top ↑

Search - The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes

Loading...