"L'onomastica paratestuale nel romanzo inglese del Settento", in I Nomi nel tempo e nello spazio.

ETS Edizioni, Pisa. Abstract. The object of this essay is the analysis of the functions of onomastics in the paratext of the18th century English novel. Assuming that the novel’s realism resides in the way it presents life, it shows how, in the fictional biography, addressed to a rising middle class audience, the name is intended as a sort of identification card of the character as if it were a real person. The work focuses on the onomastical strategies (names, surnames, nicknames, epithets, appellatives) applied by the novelists in their titles and resumptive subtitles to their plebeian characters: whores, maids, adventurers, rogues, pirates, mariners and so on. An analytical reading of a series of title-pages of famous novels by significant authors (Defoe, Richardson and Fielding), concentrating on the allusive names and surnames of the fictional female characters, underlines the socio-cultural contradictions of a masculine society, obsessed with the control and repress...