Romaneskna pretveza: predgovor v španskem in francoskem razsvetljenskem romanu

A preface may very well be a peripheral and auxiliary component of a literary work – however, conceptually, formally, and functionally it has been present in the art of literature since its very beginnings, tracing its origins to classical drama and rhetoric. Some of the inherited functions of the preface were largely maintained, while others adapted to specific literary genres in different periods. Prefatory apparatuses to some French and Spanish novels differ in various ways from rhetorical conventionalism and literary genre tradition. Their fictional and narrative character is the first to demonstrate the literarisation of the preface, while an often blurred reception boundary between the preface and the novel’s narrative indicates even clearly the semantic value being acquired by this, once auxiliary, structural element. What the motives, the intentions, and the literary devices were for the novelesque preface in the Enlightenment to become a pretext, is the question the present study attempts to answer.