The devil's details

"Footnotes, in The Devil's Details, are people, characters, heroes, and sexual beings. These heroes' adventures are followed from the early years of struggle in the seventeenth century through their triumphant dominance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and scholarship, to the harsh, undeserved belittlement they have received in the twentieth century. The Devil's Details ends with twenty-first-century footnotes facing a new world of Internet and hypertext, and makes a clarion call to preserve footnotes from the black hole of virtual reality. This is the first book to examine…