The Significance of Scraps: Paste-Overs and Parastructure in Nineteenth-Century American Poem-Making

Material texts featuring supplementary attachments—revision slips, editor’s notes, newspaper clippings, photographs, or even structural supports for uneasily assembled documents—are certainly familiar to scholars accustomed to the immense variety of textual media. And yet, despite their pervasiveness, these attachments have been largely overlooked as a distinct bibliographical category. Set in place by their author or appended at a later date by an intermediary, inscribed supplements command a startling range of appellations: “paste-ins,” “paste-ons,” “overlays,” “enclosures,” “patches,” “fold-outs,” “revision slips,” and even “composite leaves” or “part-leaves” (among others). This article posits the broadly unifying term paste-over as a provisional designation for such objects and examines their use among a handful of manuscripts constructed by three American poets of the nineteenth century: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. As these manuscripts reveal, paste-overs were deployed by these poets not only as an incidental feature of textual revision but as a central constituent of the poem-making process. These glued, taped, pinned, or otherwise adhered supplements modify the written artifact’s material architecture—what I call its parastructure . By refocusing interest onto this deceptively simple device, the paste-over emerges as a broadly recognizable object that appears with surprising regularity across material history.