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Synopsis: ForewordIf you’re looking for a summary of The Birmingham Quean, I’m afraid you haven’t come to the right place. You will, however, find that the first page of the diary layer contains a very brief (fictional) outline of the text. If you would like to read a slightly more in-depth summary of the entire book, click here for one written by Sean O'Brien.
As for this layer of the web-book, it is a synopsis in the rather more literal sense of a ‘seeing together’. Specifically what this consists of is a reproduction of the pages of the ‘Foreword’ and ‘Part 1a’ sections of The Birmingham Quean in the order that they appear in the physical book. (For an explanation of how this relates to the original ‘brown roll’ manuscript, see the ‘Note on Textual Restoration’ in the appendices.) The low resolution makes reading these reproductions on-screen for long periods virtually impossible. And print-outs are unlikely to be much better. Instead, the intention is to provide online readers with a visual means of discovering how links between the various strands of the text can form in the simplest (but by no means the least surprising) of ways: via simple physical proximity. The fact that these are little more than ‘thumbnail’ views should hopefully make this process easier. Hence synopsis. In order to read the clickable text in the popup window in tandem with this synopsis view, click on the appropriate layer button: |