Paratexts
Subtitle: thresholds of interpretation
By: Gérard Genette ; translated by Jane E. Lewin ; foreword by Richard Macksey.
Series: Literature, culture, theory ;; 20
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York, NY, USA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 427
Subjects: Literature publishing -- History.; Discourse analysis, Literary.; Authors and publishers.; Transmission of texts.; Criticism, Textual.; Literary form.; Books -- Format.
Description: Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs, and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In Paratexts, an English translation of Seuils, Gerard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declarations requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force.

With clarity, precision, and an extraordinary range of reference, Paratexts constitutes an encyclopedic survey of the customs and institutions of the Republic of Letters as they are revealed in the borderlands of the text. Genette presents a global view of these liminal mediations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function.

Richard Macksey's foreword describes how the poetics of paratexts interacts with more general questions of literature as a cultural institution, and situates Genette's work in contemporary literary theory.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.