”Catching Birds in the Net”: Paratexts of Deception and Persuasion in Early Modern Utopias

Paratexts offer windows on the dissimulatory arts of representative fiction. In the explicit to his utopia, the Venetian intellectual and journalist Gasparo Gozzi (1713- 1786) criticized publishers for deceiving readers with paratexts “so as to be able to catch birds in the net”. The value of studying paratexts to understand the fictive strategies of early modern utopian texts has been well demonstrated with respect to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). There has been less interest in the paratexts of later works of the utopian tradition, although the preface is acknowledged as reorienting early modern utopias toward realism, thereby linking the utopian imaginary to the real social problems of the contemporary world (Racault). In this article, I will examine what paratexts reveal about the tension between truth and fiction in early modern utopias and the rhetorical and persuasive purpose of that tension. I will extend my analysis beyond the preface, exploring the author’s, publisher’s and others’ roles in the presentation to readers of a small selection of works published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.