The Afterword elaborates a new vocabulary for modernism in the subcontinent: the ajnabi (stranger) and the language of estrangement, the jālī (net, lattice, web) alongside other tropes of visuality (mirrors, X-rays), the dialectic of responsibility and renunciation, and the powerful and overcoded symbology of stars and shadows. Finally, it is suggested that micrographia – the diminution of man, the dilution of inks, the tiniest of poems, and the sparest of plays – might be understood as a kind of postcolonial minimalism through its focus on minor selfhood. Mohamedi’s maxim, “the maximum out of the minimum”; Agyeya’s insistence on the moment, the immeasurable and fleeting second; the existential novel’s chance, irrelevant encounter; and the glimpse that appears through a set of holes all offer us a new reading of the modernist aesthetics.

This book begins by foregrounding that the material form of Kant’s 1785 essay could be analysed to critique the myth of proprietary authorship that presently prevails across copyright regimes. After reviewing four faces of Kant in authorship and copyright studies, I advance a medial rethinking of Kant by drawing on the intersecting traditions of book history, media theory and literary studies. In particular, Gérard Genette’s poetics informs my paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay to uncover the historical and medial-material conditions of literary production.

This chapter describes some of the salient characteristics of the ‘preface essay’, a form with a long history that has not received sustained critical attention. With reference to existing theories of the preface by Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida as well as important examples of the form by authors mainly in the English literary tradition, ranging from John Dryden, through William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and to Zadie Smith, this chapter provides a conceptual framework for authorial preface essays, their generic characteristics, and what they reveal about the relationship between the prefatorial and the essayistic. It will argue that the preface essay is a space of authorial self-crafting that attains durability and literary value by combining aspects of the prefatorial, such as its dependence on the work it prefaces and its occasionality, with the essayistic movement from the specific to the general, and the particular to the abstract.

This chapter describes some paratextual practices in the Tour, as they are defined by Gérard Genette in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. These start with the title-page and prefatory sections, and end with appendices and indexes. Other features under review are sections embedded in the text, such as manuscripts cited, proposals reprinted from external sources, lists taken from standard reference works, enumerative tables, and so on. What the various devices examined here do create a flexible medium, into which Defoe can insert a range of textual and paratextual messages – recycling his own work, transferring the substance and appearance of material from other writers, and enacting the shape of the nation in the constituent parts – so that volumes, letters, prefaces and appendices collectively body forth a virtual representation of Great Britain.