Transforming Paratext: A Transgender Touch across Time in Confessions of the Fox

Abstract

This paper examines the overlaps between a fictional paratext and a fictional personal narrative, as framed within Jordy Rosenberg’s 2018 novel Confessions of the Fox. The novel’s primary narrative, a “manuscript” of the metafictional biography of eighteenth-century transgender criminal célèbre Jack Sheppard, is encased in multiple layers of heavy footnoting by the novel’s narrator, Dr. Voth, a trans scholar himself. Rosenberg manipulates the novel form with insertions of substantial paratextual narrative, crossing over and at times mirroring Sheppard’s story, blending queer theorizations of temporality with narrative structural innovations to explore a trans “touch across time.” Rosenberg thus queers the nature and function of the paratext, reimagining and complicating its centrality to both the narrative “presenting” and the temporal “making present” of an individual narrative.