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In the film and television industry, many social movements as #MeToo, #BuryYourGay or #BlackLivesMatter have highlighted the necessity of better representations of marginalised communities on and off screen. As diversity and inclusion have become major issues in contemporary societies, video-on-demand (VOD) platforms have publicly committed to diversify representation in the films and series they produce and distribute. This article investigates how streaming platforms with different commercial or public interests and in different national contexts understand and promote diversity and inclusion through the analysis of paratext. Focussing on the visual analysis of thumbnails, we compare the French and Norwegian national public platforms (France TV and NRK TV) with the most popular commercial national platforms in each country (Canal + Series in France and Viaplay in Norway). The visibility and invisibility of gender, race, sexuality and (dis)ability on TV series' thumbnails reveal certain national and platforms' social, cultural and political values. By using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods including interviews conducted with industry professionals, we aim to highlight the impact of streaming platforms' promotional practices on the (in)visibility of diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The Laughing Girl' ('Yingning') is a short fictional story from Liaozhai zhiyi, a collection of uncanny and surreal stories written by the Chinese writer Pu Songling between the 1660s and 1720s. The stories have been made available for anglophone readers as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio published in 2006, canonised by Penguin Classics and the translator John Minford, whose approach rooted in 'nouvelle Chinoiserie' imbues the tales with a sense of novelty or strangeness, both textually and paratextually. In this study, we will investigate how Minford foregrounds the story's novelty with his translator's voice in the translated text. Comparison and analysis reveal that on the textual level, Minford's shifting focalisation and narrative voice accentuates the strangeness in 'The Laughing Girl' and that his additions in terms of characterisation construct Yingning an even more outlandish fox spirit. On the paratextual level, he foregrounds the text's novelty at the expense of other themes, such as the moral edification or social critique. Minford's unique perspective on and approach to the source text align with the publisher's aim to appeal to a general readership, leading him to highlight the text's exoticism in his translation. Although Minford's translation is both accessible and stylistically deft, it appears to reduce Strange Tales to a mere anthology of the bizarre and grotesque while constructing an 'imagined and ethereal orient', as is clearly indicated by the corpus-assisted readers' reception analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Une femme (1987; A Woman's Story), Annie Ernaux declared that she wished to remain "au-dessous de la littérature" ("below literature"). To what extent is this position, which she has maintained over the last decades, compatible with her consecration as a writer? This article considers the publication of Les Années (2008; The Years) as a turning point followed by the publication of several collaborative and dialogic texts that call into question established literary forms and make visible the process of creation, that it to say the poiesis of the œuvre. By revealing the act of writing, Ernaux contributes to establishing a genealogy of her work, even showing it to have a mythical dimension which is nevertheless tied to socio-political concerns. Exploring the resonance between Ernaux's literary pieces and her paratextual interventions highlights the complex network on which Ernaux's conception of writing, and position towards the idea of literature, are built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Games are possibility spaces and the experiential circumstances generated by the execution of digital game code are paratextual thresholds of transition and transaction. If games are paratexts, game design is a form of modeling; game-playing is a form of transactional mapping; and the critical engagement with games is best approached via a modified version of "deep mapping," a digital humanities process indebted to textual studies approaches. This paper will explore the paratextual idea of deep mapping in relation to Hello Games' constantly evolving No Man's Sky, and The C64, a full-sized reissue of Commodore 64 hardware by Retro Games Ltd. Overall, the use of deep mapping to comprehend the paratextual thresholds of games validates the importance of textual studies approaches, acknowledging the complex relationship between physicality and virtuality while also reconfirming that games require methodologies that move beyond reading paradigms and the exclusive framework of textuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now 40 years since Gérard Genette's work introduced the term paratexts into literary studies, giving a unifying name to the many kinds of texts that serve as thresholds to other texts. The term and concept have migrated into the study of several other media forms, including video game studies, thanks principally to Mia Consalvo in Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games (2007) and Steven Jones in The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (2008). The term's meaning expanded in the process, which has been the subject of much debate since then. Over a decade later, the timing seems apt to take stock of the concept of paratextuality and consider new ways of adapting it. This introduction to a special issue titled "Video Games and Paratextuality" reconsiders Genette's reception in video game studies, and introduces a set of articles that together look beyond Genette. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video games present a complex medium for the study of paratextuality due to their fringed textual, authorial, and material borders. This paper addresses how previous and current research in video game paratextuality informs analyzes of authorial intent, player agency, and materiality with regard to the text–paratexts relationship established in video games. The first part of this article revisits Genette's concept of paratexts in light of video game scholarship. It then offers a detailed analysis of authorial intent and player agency as well as materiality in terms of paratexts by looking at sandbox games, narrative games, and first-person shooter games as case study groups. Distinguishing between instances of high, medium, and low paratextuality shows that ancillary material is located at different distances from the text and with varying influence on its reception, proposing paratextuality as a gradient scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portal (2007) presents an unusually complex example for the study of video game paratexts. This article uses the case of the game's promotional website ApertureScience.com to consider how paratextuality and the associated concepts of ephemerality and materiality may be further refined to open up new dimensions of video games as objects of interpretation and play. The article draws from the field of textual studies, which specializes in the particularities of media, and in the entanglement of technical detail with interpretation and meaning. The first part re-evaluates the nature of the book as an analogy for the materiality of video games, and critiques Gérard Genette's conception of bookish paratexts and its applicability to video games. The article then offers a detailed analysis of ApertureScience.com as a paratext, including its satirical critiques of positivism and corporate research, and concludes with a discussion of the materiality of digital paratexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most stylistic analyses of literary texts begin with the text proper, largely ignoring the paratextual elements that precede it. The extent of this lacuna within stylistics is so great that a search through the back catalogue of Language and Literature, stylistics' flagship journal, returns no results for contributions whose titles contain the terms 'title' or 'paratext'. In what follows we underline the implications of this neglect through findings which point to the import of titles for readers' interpretive processes. Drawing on our analysis of a 58-million-word corpus of book reviews from the online retailer Amazon.com, the research reported on here provides evidence for what many theorists have claimed but for which they have often provided no empirical support, namely, that titles contribute to the establishment of reader expectations about a text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TV recap has become one of the most ubiquitous forms of criticism in contemporary media culture, proliferating across multiple media spheres and domains. At its simplest, it provides an opportunity for people to catch up with what they have missed. However, it is also a space for engaging with reactions to a program: an inherently affective and social experience. This article seeks to theorize the TV recap, its uses, and its pleasures. It considers the recap as a form of paratext, and seeks to unpack its relationship to textuality. Specifically, it considers the practice of reality TV recapping, which often positions both recapper and reader/viewer as consuming the text ironically. This article uses a corpus of recaps of the 2020 season of The Bachelor Australia – including recaps by the author – to answer three questions: how does the recap energize, contextualize, and modify textuality? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeremy Blaustein's liberal translation of Metal Gear Solid (1998) was a critical creative intercession which helped facilitate the successful localization and positive reception – in the west – of a crucial early project in the development of 3d games. It can also be seen as an unacceptable liberty taken with a carefully produced script, one which too often puts the needs of a western ear ahead of faithfulness to the original. Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Task of the Translator' and its inheritors in translation studies offer a definition of translation and its utility with which one can justify such a creative intervention as a necessary continuation in the life cycle of the original work and an honest interpretation of the game's paratextual environment; in the localization of Metal Gear Solid Blaustein performed the task of the translator as Benjamin conceived it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Franco-Prussian War was not only a watershed in the history of Europe, it also inspired a watershed moment in French literary history: the publication of Les Soirées de Médan in 1880. The short story collection was a central text in framing a Naturalist group identity, but each of its six stories is also a scathing attack on the Franco-Prussian War and on the catastrophic French defeat. It has been argued that the myth surrounding the volume quickly eclipsed the stories themselves, but the volume's publication history shows that some of the contributors wrote their stories before a collective volume was proposed, suggesting that the critique of the war was initially as important as forming literary allegiances. This article examines the book from both angles, as a literary-historical event and as an anti-war tract. The uncomfortable relationship between the two is underscored by the many paratextual and textual absences in Les Soirées de Médan, which simultaneously conceal and draw attention to the war. It will show that the critique of the war of 1870–1871 is a necessary aspect of the public fashioning of Naturalist group identity, but that this public position-taking complicates our understanding of Naturalism as a cohesive literary movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response article, I revisit the idea of paratext in video games. I start, however, with the example of a book by Tolstoy, and the textual studies work of McKenzie and McGann, in order to make the point that paratextuality has never been limited to Genette's rigid definition, even in the case of print texts. Video games foreground what has always been the case: the dynamic, volatile, multidirectional nature of paratexts, which can take you into but also out of the enclosure of the main text (or "game itself") in unexpected ways. Illustrations include Animal Crossing: New Horizons and a mobile sneakerhead game, Aglet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary historical culture, digital entertainment games about the Second World War have become a prominent format for cultural expression. By allowing players to actively engage with the history of the Second World War, this body of commercial digital entertainment games can significantly co-configure how this war is understood, especially in light of the blurring distinction between formal and informal historical learning. This article presents an interpretative content analysis of the marketing 'paratexts' of a corpus of digital entertainment games about the Second World War that are shared through online game stores and online game community platforms. This is done to provide insight into how digital entertainment games and their online community platforms can function as sites for informal historical learning, both in relation to the history of the Second World War and the central goals of formal history education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay develops the concept of "quantified play" to describe and analyze the recent practice of self-tracking in the play of videogames. I argue that statistical, self-tracking utilities in videogames shape how gameplay "appears" and how it is experienced and valued by users. I proceed by situating contemporary self-tracking in games as part of a broader history of play as "quantified." From there, drawing on interdisciplinary studies of self-tracking, as well as Bernard Stiegler's postphenomenological analyses of technology, I characterize quantified play in three main ways. First, it is voluntary and occupied with self-knowledge. Second, it is used in mundane or everyday contexts. Third, it relates to the habitual faculty of users. The remainder of the essay illustrates the concept of quantified play through two examples of tracking hardware and software—showing how numerical or statistical apprehensions of player activity (and visualizations thereof) shape how we negotiate videogames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the linguistic features of the speeches that end Shakespeare's plays, some of which are formally labelled as Epilogues. It introduces a play's last words as a type of paratext using the theoretical models devised by Genette (1997), and then considers the material evidence surrounding Epilogues, a specific form of last words, using research on their ephemeral and occasional nature by Stern (2009). The difficulties of using corpus methods in the case of small, specialist subcorpora of paratexts is then considered, and the methodology adopted to extract and present the results is outlined. The demonstrates features of the Last Words corpus: how pronouns raise questions about the speaker's stance (with reference to work by Goffman (1979) and Messerli (2017)); how these speeches deploy the language of inclusivity; how they interpellate spectators or readers to promote a specific agenda. Because last words enact the fragile liminal moment where characters, actors and audience are united by their experience of the performance, the article considers their retrospective and prospective orientation. It demonstrates how the prominence of verbs like 'shall' and 'will' can be used for marketing purposes. The problems raised by uneven dispersion of terms are discussed leading to a case study of the Epilogue of As You Like It which demonstrates how its use of language is deliberately linked to the discursive world of the play which precedes it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New media affords significant opportunities for audience feedback and participation, with the power to influence the creation and development of contemporary works of fiction, particularly when these appear in serialized instalments. With access to creators permitted via social media, and with online platforms facilitating the creation and distribution of audience paratexts, fans increasingly have the power to shape the fictional worlds and diversity of the characters found within the series they enjoy. A noteworthy and understudied example is fiction podcasting, an emerging form that draws on conventions of established media such as radio and television. Despite the recent surge in the popularity of podcasts, little scholarly attention has been given to the format, except to discuss it as either a continuation of radio programming or part of a transmedia landscape for texts which are centred in media such as television and film. This article argues that fiction podcasting offers unique affordances for creating serial works of fiction, taking The Adventure Zone as a case study which demonstrates the power of successful participatory culture. The podcast has grown from modest beginnings to acquire a considerable and passionate fan network, has diversified into other media forms, and, though available for free, is financially supporting its creators and raising substantial amounts of money for charities. Crucial in its success is the creators' cultivation of an inclusive environment for fans, and a constant attempt to feature characters representative of a diversity of gender and sexual identities, particularly those typically excluded from other science fiction worlds. This article argues that The Adventure Zone and the format of fiction podcasting demonstrate a shift in contemporary culture, away from established mass media programming and towards a participatory, transmedia, fan-focused form of storytelling which utilizes the unique advantages of new media technologies in its creation, development, and distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies the method of paratextual analysis to six electronic books, or ebooks, in an academic library collection at a small liberal arts college. Two books are selected from each of three platforms: ebrary, EBSCO, and SpringerLink. The characteristics of each book are described, including design and readership, as well as 2 years of usage statistics from the specific library, and altmetrics where available. The paratextual study leads to a closer investigation of the usage statistics themselves and concludes that despite industry standards, they are not calculated consistently across vendor platforms and that while these data are invisible to researchers outside of the library, there are also essential elements that librarians mistakenly take at face value when comparing ebook usage from multiple vendors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Told through a series of interrelated documents (including emails, text messages, newspaper clippings and blog posts), Annabel Smith's interactive digital novel The Ark epitomises the contemporary hybridity of the dystopian genre. Designed to be fully immersive, the story can be engaged with across media, enabling readers to 'dive deeper into the world of the novel' and challenge how they experience dystopian texts. Taking a Text World Theory perspective, I examine the implications of this challenge, investigating the impact of transmedial storytelling on world-building and exploring the creative evolution of dystopian epistolary more broadly. In analysing both the ebook element of The Ark and certain facets of its companion pieces (which take the form of a dynamic website and a smartphone app), I investigate the creation of the novel's text-worlds, considering the process of multimodal meaning construction, examining the conceptual intricacies of the epistolary form and exploring the influence of paratextual matter on world-building and construal. In doing so, I offer new insights into the conceptualisation of 'empty text-worlds', extend Gibbons' discussions of transmedial world-creation and argue for a more nuanced understanding of dystopian epistolary as framed within Text World Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the media convergence era, brands are embracing hybrid forms of advertising communication such as branded content, product placement and sponsored TV 'pods', brand blogs, shareable video, programmatic advertising, 'native' advertising and more, as alternatives to, and extensions of, traditional mass media advertising campaigns. In this article, we draw on Genette's theory of transtextuality to reframe this phenomenon from a paratextual purview. We suggest that the analogy of the paratext articulates the iterative, ambiguous, participative and intertextual character of much contemporary brand communication. We describe extended examples of paratextual advertising and promotion that illustrate the fluid and mutually contingent relation of advertising text to paratext, and we outline an analytical framework for future research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) was marked in metropolitan France by divisive debates over France’s presence in Algeria and over the issue of state-sponsored torture. Two testimonial texts written during the war, Henri Alleg’s La Question (1958) and Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi’s Djamila Boupacha (1962), stand out as examples of writing about torture, due to the texts’ connections to the Parisian intellectual community, and their social, political and literary repercussions. Both texts underscore the obscenity of the act of torture and how that obscenity is recreated in torture testimonials that exist in and describe a liminal space that disturbs notions of what can be seen and heard. This article argues that the paratextual legitimisation that Alleg’s and Boupacha’s texts undergo brings the act of torture into public discourse, enabling them to become audible or readable despite the strong preference for denial and inattention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive media board games reflect a changing media culture. Converging media text and technology with game play mechanics and rules, these board games exist as a hybrid form of game and media. In this article, I examine interactive paratextual board games – games based on media products that utilize other forms of media to produce random or immersive experiences. While previous discussions of media franchising investigates game paratexts through industrial and economic shifts, I explicate aesthetic, ludic, and textual concerns of cult franchises through an analysis of three interactive board games, namely, Isaac Asimov’s Robot VCR Mystery Game, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game, and the Indiana Jones DVD Adventure Game. Ultimately, I argue that these interactive paratextual board games manifest, reflect, and augment early convergence culture characteristics, revealing that interactive board games exemplify contemporary new media characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by Goffman’s concept of footing, this study seeks to explore the multiple voices and speaking roles that a pamphleteer may assume in the preface of witchcraft pamphlets, along with their pragmatic functions. The study quantitatively and qualitatively analyzes the prefatory section of 13 witchcraft pamphlets, spanning from Elizabethan to Jacobean England (1566–1621). The findings reveal the ways in which pamphleteers consistently shift into and depart from three speaking identities (authorial, interlocutory, and character roles), and different patterns of speaking role inhabitance are witnessed during the periods under study, which in turn makes the prefaces come across in different ways. Such distinct patterns strategically serve to promote the reception, and avoid the refutation, of the main text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a paratextual analysis of a genre-specific case of the book publishing industry, namely that of travel guidebook publishing. Paratexts refer to all the ‘accompanying’ textual instances that gravitate around, but never completely pertain to, the ‘primary’, authorial text. In contrast to prevalent theorisations of paratexts as simultaneous hermeneutic and marketing frameworks that regulate a reader’s interpretive practices (reception) and/or media purchasing habits (consumption), I suggest that paratexts are vehicles through which media production companies engage in auto-communication, that is, self-interpret with a view to legitimating an ethical, virtuous and authentic institutional self. I furthermore suggest that a media company’s paratextual legitimation efforts unfold in reference to the genre, under the label of which its media products are produced, promoted and distributed. Genres are central to media institutions’ legitimacy, while the paratext is the principal conduit through which legitimation is conveyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given widespread criticism of the hierarchies of the world literary system that privilege certain languages, regions, styles, and genres, this article explores the value of small publishers and short story collections that resist trends within commercial publishing. Taking Comma Press as a case study, the article investigates how the paratext and collected stories of Madinah: City Stories from the Middle East operate against the marginalization of the region’s literatures in commercial Anglophone publishing. Although such publications remain within a system that produces and packages the margins for consumption in the centre, by circulating less well-known writers and regions they can play a valuable role in expanding canons of world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Intangible spaces exist as a particular gathering together of influences, including those of people, things, locations and technologies. They are fascinating for thinking about how technologies influence cinematic space. This discussion of digital three-dimensional (3D) technologies in Hugo and the image maximum (IMAX) format in The Dark Knight uses paratexts to elaborate on this idea. Paratexts released in conjunction with Hugo are used to introduce an understanding of digital 3D cinematic space as something that is built as opposed to recorded. Those of The Dark Knight show film-makers encountering unexpected spaces arising from their use of IMAX technologies. By paying attention to the parameters of intangible space in The Dark Knight, the IMAX format is configured not as seamlessly immersive but as a location that offers multiple points of engagement for an audience. Both these examples demonstrate how thinking in terms of relationality, mediation and entanglement describes a cinematic space given shape by and through technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Paratextual aids to reading in medieval codex books, printed codex books, and Kindle ebooks are compared. Medieval scribes designed paratextual elements that enhanced diverse reading practices, from lectio divina to scholarly textual study. Printers adopted and standardized many elements of paratext, and contemporary readers depend on these elements to navigate printed books. Because familiar paratextual aids to reading are less visible in Kindle ebooks, readers find those ebooks harder to navigate. Development of effective ebook paratext must take into account the needs and practices of readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Games borrow ceaselessly from the past to constitute themselves. This locates the medium at the heart of our contemporary obsession with how to engage the past and the “real.” In tethering digital hyperreality to the horizon of history, myth, and ritual, games generate a disavowed and subjunctive engagement with a sense of “real enough.” They thus resemble Victor Turner’s liminoids: autotelic, bounded experiences of leisure that cultivate accepting yet playful attitudes against the “real enough” on offer. This commercialized bricolage is not dismissible as inauthentic simulacrum. Rather, such games demonstrate the ways in which new media are recalibrating our modes of engagement with the real. This article analyzes three key aspects of liminoid games: (1) techniques of reappropriation during production, (2) rules and expectations of engagement with the past and the “real” that games offer, and (3) emergent ways in which player communities, discourses, and productions recalibrate those politics of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Starting from a set of examples of translations in which translators use paratextual or code-switching devices to voice reservations about the works they are translating, I explore the similarities between this type of translation and what Dorrit Cohn calls discordant narration. I go on to argue in favour of viewing translation as a form of reported discourse, more particularly what Relevance theory calls echoic (and in some cases ironic) speech, a species of interpretive discourse in which the speaker’s attitude towards the words being reported is relevant. Viewing translation as reported discourse implies that the translated words are embedded in the translator’s reporting discourse. I conclude by suggesting that it is up to the reader to make a translator’s attitude relevant, and that deictic shifts from the framing to the framed discourse enable the reader to discern or construe the translator’s positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue that translated texts and translational paratexts invite readers to read translated texts as if they were the originals, a hitherto widely ignored premise of translations. Although translations are produced by many agents in collaboration (authors, publishers, copy-editors and translators), they are generally presented as texts produced predominantly by one agent, the author. I therefore claim that there is a ‘translation pact’ at work in translated literature, a rhetorical construction through which readers are invited to read translated texts as if they were the originals. A narratological implication of the pact is that individual readers who accept the pact will reconstruct only an ‘implied author’ and not an ‘implied translator’. This view differs from earlier works on the implied translator (e.g. Munday, 2008: 11; O’Sullivan, 2003; Schiavi, 1996). The translation pact is most often constructed implicitly, but sometimes translators draw attention to themselves and manifest their agency, for example by discussing translational decisions in prefaces and notes. Against what one would assume from previous claims on the translator’s ‘visibility’ (Venuti, 1995), I demonstrate that the translator’s presence does not necessarily work against the pact but can rather strengthen it. The translation pact explains why readers, including critics, literary scholars and other professional readers, often talk and write about translations as if they were originals composed solely by the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complicated title may put some readers off. Others may be intrigued by the complexities that a messy title suggests. “Un-doing a title” is an essay that focuses on unraveling the threads of Hanna Guttorm’s messy article “Becoming-(a)-Paper, or an Article Undone.” The essay, first, introduces titology and titles and subtitles as paratexts. Second, it examines the title’s main concepts, namely, Becoming, Paper, Article, Undone, (Post-)Knowing, Writing (Again), Nomadic, and Messy, which structure the article. It concludes with brief comments on topics raised in the main text including that of academic texts as love letters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy has attracted huge audiences all over the world. Interest in the trilogy has been fuelled by revelations about the life and death of the author, and by clever publicity campaigns for both the books and the film adaptations, but little attention has been paid so far to the language and style of the novels. This article will focus on Larsson’s attempt to incorporate social campaigning and politics into the crime genre, and the extent to which he is able to combine rhetorical attacks on the injustices of contemporary Swedish society with a gripping plot. The article will offer a close analysis of the stylistic ‘gear shifts’ in the novels (Page, 1973), along with an examination of the various types of paratextual matter (Genette, 1997 [1987]) they incorporate. In addition, I will explore how far Larsson’s writing participates in the reworking of definitions of criminality and deviance within the genre (Gregoriou, 2007). Finally, the article will consider how far the film adaptations dilute Larsson’s social and political agenda, and tone down or glamorise the sexual violence which is such a feature of the novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates the challenges that video game marketing encounters when selling the pleasures of playing virtual war. While marketing paratexts are crucial to video games because of the vagaries of their industry, they are especially important for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, as it is the first of the franchise to be set in the 21st century and immerse players in contemporary theaters of war. These marketing paratexts not only generate hype for the game and work to drive sales, but as importantly, they also suggest particular textual readings over others with the goal of insulating Call of Duty’s virtual war play from interpretations and criticisms that might link the violent play on-screen to the worldly violence unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the expanding global tourist trade for fictional places derived from popular narratives that are recreated for the tourist’s pleasure. Through a case study of a Harry Potter tour in the United Kingdom, I explore how the design of fantasy-themed ventures encourage a re-imagining of the landscape where (f)actual and imaginary geographies exist side by side. The locations function as affective, liminal spaces where the tourist anticipates and partakes in the transformation of sights/sites. Narrative and spatial engagement are crucial in producing a sense of embodied experience and an enchanted, and enchanting, reality where the realms of possibility are expanded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses one of the most theoretically and linguistically vexing issues in the history of English poetic language: stylistic variation in Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. It suggests that two footnotes, added to the 1800 edition, offer a new perspective on a question which has prompted debate since its publication: specifically, what is the relationship between Wordsworth's use of dialect and the language of 'low and rustic life' promised by the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads? In sections 1 and 2 the article expands on the importance of the footnotes in relation to the discussion surrounding Wordsworth's language. Section 3 examines the departure of Lyrical Ballads from 18th-century conventions regarding the glossing of non-standard language in poetry, while section 4 explores the function of the unfootnoted and unframed regionalisms that can be found throughout the collection. Sections 5 and 6 discuss the content of the two footnotes in relation to Wordsworth's blurring of the roles of poet and glosser, and suggest that this conflation of roles is connected to Wordsworth's implicit blurring of Standard English and dialect in his definition of 'low and rustic life' (a definition explored in greater detail in section 7). The conclusion suggests that the lack of specificity in Wordsworth's Preface and his approach to framing dialect were part of a single strategy to integrate Standard English and dialect in a more organic manner than was typical of 18th-century writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her book Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles described the concept of the technotext. Hayles used this concept to provide an analysis of a range of texts, including online work, based on their materiality. The analysis described in this article complements this method by developing an approach that explores the conditions of production of contemporary digital literature. It achieves this aim by providing a close reading of the online paratextual elements associated with the first four episodes of Inanimate Alice by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph. In doing so, it modifies the print-based analytical framework provide by Gérard Genette and others to develop a detailed account of the off-site, on-site and in-file paratexts of this online work. It sets out a range of thresholds that mould the reception of this text. It also notes how they position it within wider discourses about genre, media, literature and literacy. This article concludes by exploring the limits of this paratextual reading. It discusses whether it provides an adequate account of the material conditions of these texts. It then seeks to integrate this approach into the vision of literary studies described by Hayles in Writing Machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]