Paratext

Paratext is a concept in literary interpretation. The main text of published authors (e.g. the story, non-fiction description, poems, etc) is often surrounded by other material supplied by editors, printers, and publishers, which is known as the paratext. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or its interpretation by the public. Paratext is most often associated with books, as they typically include a cover (with associated cover art), title, front matter (dedication, opening information, forward), back matter (endpapers, colophon) footnotes, and many other materials not crafted by the author. Other editorial decisions can also fall into the category of paratext, such as the formatting or typography. Because of their close association with the text, it seems that authors should be given the final say about paratexual materials, but often that is not the case. One recent example of controversy surrounding paratext is the case of the young adult novel Liar, which was initially published with an image of a white girl on the cover, although the narrator of the story was identified in the text as black.

The concept of paratext is closely related to the concept of hypotext, which is the earlier text that serves as a source for the current text.

Theory

Literary theorist Gérard Genette defines paratext as those things in a published work that accompany the text, things such as the author's name, the title, preface or introduction, or illustrations. Genette states "More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold." It is "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that ... is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it". Then quoting Philippe Lejeune, Genette further describes paratext as "a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one's whole reading of the text".

Bibliography

• Genette, Gérard: Seuils. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987. (translated as Paratexts. Thresholds of interpretation, Cambridge: CUP, 1997)
• Huber, Alexander: Paratexte in der englischen Erzählprosa des 18. Jahrhunderts/Paratexts in eighteenth-century English prose fiction [PDF 1.5 MB]. Master's thesis (in German). Munich: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich, 1997.
• Müllerová, Lenka: Reklamní aspekty sekundárních knižních textů v devadesátých letech 20. století (Thesis). Available from http://is.muni.cz/th/117754/ff_d/?lang=en;id=121545
• Ronald Collins & David Skover, "Paratexts," Stanford Law Review, vol. 44, pp. 509-552 (1992)