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.