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This chapter looks at what happens in the shift from the Danish to the American version of the popular TV series Forbrydelsen/The Killing in order to consider the cross-cultural significance of the ‘lost girl’ crime story. While TV crime drama has been accused of trading in degrading images of violated women for shock value, this chapter focuses attention on how the lost girl trope is presented on such shows via forms of new media technologies. Its central assertion is that, in order to fully account for the often-damning gender politics of contemporary TV crime dramas, one must look not simply to the content of their storylines but to their modes of framing and address across platforms, and the affective responses that they in turn enable and/or disenable. How do technological processes of mediation and remediation shape cultural/ideological understandings of violence against girls and women on contemporary TV dramas? And how does the remediation of violence through the digital interface extend beyond the TV crime dramas themselves to the paratextual materials that increasingly surround post-network TV?

Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxieme Sexe (1949) is recognised as a cornerstone of modern feminist thought, highlighting her position as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century and the text’s translation into more than forty languages attests to the pertinence of Beauvoirian thought in its ability to transcend both time and space and resonate with women’s lived realities in different socio-cultural moments. Thus far scholarship has focussed on how Beauvoir’s philosophical discourse has been translated, yet little attention has been paid to the translation of the tome’s paratexts, namely, the interpretative frames, in the Genettian sense, that fashion the reader’s encounter with author and text. This study examines the genealogical trajectory of the paratranslated elements of Beauvoir’s original French text and its English translations. Specifically, my analysis focuses on both textual and iconic paratexts to investigate the role they play in the transgenerational reception of Beauvoir’s text. In terms of textual paratexts, non-authorial peritextual items such as introductions, biographical notes, and blurbs are studied comparatively and diachronically across all existing French and English editions. Secondly, iconic paratexts such as front and back cover images, as well as author photographs are studied in order to understand the ways in which both Beauvoir and her text have been reconfigured differently over time to serve different socio-cultural agendas. Throughout the study, I explore the role that gender plays in relation to paratexts, both in terms of how Beauvoir’s own authorial, gendered subjectivity is transmediated and transmogrified via paratextual devices and, how gender as a social construction, inflects the elaboration of paratexts.

Prologues have an important paratextual function in mediating and framing the “main” text for readers. This chapter focuses on a set of additional prologues to the Pauline Epistles in Cambridge, Emmanuel College MS 108, a Wycliffite New Testament (NT) from the early/mid fifteenth century. Some of these Middle English prologues are unique, while others also survive in an eighteenth-century transcript from another (now lost) fifteenth-century NT. The prologues are scrutinized here with regard to their textual sources, citation techniques, compositional principles and thematic concerns. To situate the findings within the broader framework of Wycliffite biblical scholarship in later medieval England, other related Bible prologues and glosses are also examined. The composition process of the prologues seems to have consisted of selecting, arranging and joining passages from a larger textual mass, with the occasional addition of an introductory clause or an explanatory gloss. The frames of interpretation constructed through the prologues emphasize the intertwined themes of comforting those who suffer persecution and tribulations, and the subversion and temptation of the faithful by false apostles and false preachers. The prologue writers avoid connecting these topics explicitly with contemporary events.

This chapter examines the impact of Wide Sargasso Sea on some contemporary re-workings of Jane Eyre, tracking its influence through Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester, Jane Stubbs’s Thornfield Hall and Eve Marie Mont’s young adult novel, A Breath of Eyre, and highlighting its looming presence, both in text and in paratext. In diegesis and exegesis, these re-writings work on and from both Rhys and Bronte. The essay attends to what Simone Murray calls “the digital literary sphere”—the many online reading and reviewing platforms—in its account of the conjoined afterlives of these texts in contemporary literary culture. The shift to digital platforms has offered authors greater scope to elucidate the multiple strands of reference, influence and authority that tie their texts to those of Rhys and Bronte and render reader responses immediate and visible.

This chapter, which is makes uses of the concepts of text and interpretation, analyses how these two concepts are transformed during the digital age. First of all, the “dangerous” nature of the text is highlighted and how it has been persecuted over the centuries. Then it is shown how, with the advent of the digital age, the text, even if it has multiplied, it has been infinitely weakened to the advantage of interpretation: what is said about a text becomes more important than what the text says. The paratext dominates the text and no longer serves as support to it. It is therefore highlighted how a fourth way of interpreting the text has developed over the years based on paratext, that is, on the opinions that others have of the text. From the moment in which the Self can be considered as a text, the weakening and devaluation of the text with respect to the paratext also leads to a weakening of the Self. And in fact, in the present society there are many clues that make one think of a tendency of the Self to disappear.

Many definitions of Gothic suggest a contradiction or internal tension, and this chapter explores this notion using an analysis of the host figures of British girls’ comics. It draws on extensive archival research to identify, survey, and compare these characters: demonstrating how early authoritative and patriarchal hosts give way to more diverse figures, and arguing that these fall into two distinct types (serial and series). These hosts can raise questions, provide explanations or morals, interfere with plot events, step in and out of the storyworld, and break the borders between the text and paratext. The chapter concludes that they are liminal figures, who problematise the boundaries between fiction and reality, and that the subversive freedom of the comics medium allows them a range of transgressions that epitomise the tensions and contradictions of Gothic.

This chapter investigates the ways in which genres are made manifest, both in the peritext of the comics and in the comics themselves. It argues that the use of the paratext to advertise genres has undergone a significant transformation since the 1940s, with a shift from genres to proprietary architexts, enabled by the physical properties of comic books and graphic novels. The chapter also examines the funny animal genre, to argue that nearly all of the stylistic and narrative choices to be found in these comics constitute genre signifiers.

This chapter is aimed at analyzing how the listener can comprehend the narrator’s speech. It treats the notion of text and its double nature as an object of interpretation and as an interpretation itself. Discussing Genette’s notion of paratext, Jacobson’s model of communication, and Eco’s theory of interpretation, a provisory model is proposed regarding three type of interpretation according the main point of view that is chosen: the point of view of the Author, the point of view of the text, and that of the reader. It is shown how these ways of interpreting can work together and cooperate using excerpts of a psychoanalytical session as examples. In this way, the concept of narrative interpretation is proposed. It is meant as an act of cooperation among these different points of view with which an interpretation is elaborated.

Nordic crime novels have become a phenomenon on the global book market, famous for painting a dark picture of previously idealized societies. The success of Nordic Noir belongs specifically to its reception in Germany, which holds a longstanding interest in all things northern or Scandinavian. Nordic crime novels are translated and packaged in ways to render them with a specific northern ambiance: snowy, solitary, and sinister. Brands then belong with paratext, such as blurbs and cover images that construct a given text. The main argument is that brands like Nordic Noir resonate culture and thrive on the paratextual threshold. This chapter combines interviews with literary agents, an editor, and German-language readers with illustrative examples of paratextual elements of Nordic Noir, and especially Schwedenkrimi. First, the German market was already primed by interest in Noir and regional identity before the emergence of Nordic Noir, creating a backdrop for its reception. For readers, Nordic Noir connects outer and inner landscapes, creating a more nuanced understanding that even “normal” people can become criminal. To conclude, the case of crime novels and Nordic Noir highlights how paratext can bring out symbolic qualities of a text in a way that resonates and reverberates a brand, especially across cultural borders.

This chapter investigates how graphic novels respond to critical debates around the limits of representing genocide by employing two crucial anti-kitsch strategies as a means to avoid the dangers of kitsch and excess. The first of these strategies is a modernist aesthetic that highlights the failures and crises around (not) witnessing and (not) fully comprehending the events by placing visual and verbal emphasis on the eyes of the victims and the notion of seeing. The second strategy can be found in the paratext, which is used to posit truth claims and straightforwardly anchor knowledge about the genocidal events. In particular, pre- and postfaces are used to comment on the graphic novel’s ability to present an appropriate and truthful representation of the events.

Reader marginalia are one of the most valuable forms of paratext available to researchers. They offer great potential towards a better understanding of how early modern people read and engaged with books as texts and as physical objects. With so many early published works focusing on medicine and health, marginalia offer particular opportunities for those interested in medical history. This chapter will demonstrate how major cataloguing projects like the Glasgow Incunabula Project are uncovering fascinating examples of medical-related reader marginalia and creating online finding aids, which make it easier for researchers to locate and access early annotated books. Yet large numbers of books remain entirely hidden from view to researchers, either completely uncatalogued or catalogued without copy-specific metadata. This chapter will urge marginalia researchers to liaise with and collaborate with librarians and curators more closely in future to help tackle this issue and allow researchers to begin to address broader research questions.

This chapter investigates the practice of employing epigraphs in eighteenth-century natural history books. It examines, quantitatively and qualitatively, the significance of these very special parts of text, which are elements of both paratext and intertextuality, and which are very widespread in every kind of literature during the Enlightenment. We aim to describe their origin, their role in the architecture and the organization of the book, as well as the ways they establish connections with other works. We attempt to understand their various functions and, in that respect, the differences between the uses of epigraphs in several European languages are considered. We argue that besides their aesthetic role, epigraphs were often endowed with a diversity of other functions by authors as well as publishers and readers, in connection with the content of the book, the other elements of the paratext (title, front illustrations, etc.) and the context. Accordingly, epigraphs make sense, for example, of the aims of the authors, the patronage networks, and the intended targeted and real audience of scientific works.

This chapter examines the textual and visual representation of twins in two seventeenth-century midwifery manuals, Jacques Guillemeau’s Child-birth or, the Happie Deliuerie of Women (1612), and Thomas Chamberlayne’s The Compleat Midwife’s Practice (1656). It highlights how the twins of the texts are never shown to engage in physical contact with one another, but those of the medical paratexts are continually portrayed as touching. Through its discussion of this discrepancy, this chapter reveals that there was a seventeenth-century uncertainty as to when the relationship between two people who were born at the same time actually began, and how it would be affected by a parting which was deemed necessary for their survival. It also argues that when an equal weighting is attributed to text and paratext, a richer and more comprehensive reading emerges than when one of them is privileged over the other.

In this chapter, we ask why military memoirs look like they do. We focus in this chapter on the book covers, and do so using a framework suggested by an existing literature on paratext. We examine in detail some of the key paratextual features of the covers of military memoirs, looking at the titles of books, the way in which an author’s name is presented, and the overall design of the cover, including the imagery and other features used. Given that the cover is so significant for the sales of a book, we then go on to consider how covers and their imagery comprise a visual economy, and in turn how this suggests a relationship to wider narratives about war through which it is given meaning in contemporary public cultural life.

This chapter uses new approaches to seventeenth-century paratexts to analyse medical texts addressed to the poor, with the aim of illuminating face-to-face interactions between practitioners, their peers and competitors (from housewife to apothecary to learned physician), and patients. In a seventeenth-century context, printed texts could be seen as proxies for the author’s spoken address to a specific audience or audiences. This brought them within the constraints of spoken decorum, itself governed by which topics were considered proper for which rank. The chapter looks at the paratexts to Thomas Law’s Physick for the Poor (1657) and shows how they constitute a set of relationships between medical professionals, amateurs and patients which were fluid and ephemeral, shifting between coalition and competition in response to social setting.

In this chapter Wilson considers literary translation as restoration, as evidenced by the 2009 The Restored New Testament by Willis Barnstone (1927–). Bible translation has been of great importance in the history of Western translation, and Barnstone’s career and translation project are contextualised within tradition, viewing the Hellenistic Greek New Testament as a set of literary texts. The chapter brings out four aspects of Barnstone’s target text, using them as a basis to discuss issues that are raised by literary translation: the order and selection of texts; the translation of names; translation as poetry; the use of paratext. A conclusion addresses the relevance of Barnstone’s text within the field.

The chapter presents the multimodal analysis of three handbills printed for irregular medical practitioners (especially surgeons) in the second half of the seventeenth century. These cultural artefacts, besides describing irregulars’ usually multiple medicaments, include conspicuous images and/or particular fonts used to catch the reader’s eye and improve sales, thus showing their authors’ sophisticated care for typography. The chapter considers how such details interacted with the language of advertising in the early stages of mass communication and marketing procedures. It is this interaction between linguistic and visual features that can lead to such a reversal of status between text and images that words may be interpreted as paratextual additions to visual texts. In conclusion, a source of one of the images is pinpointed so as to show how irregulars popularised scientific publications.

In the Danish environmental documentary Ekspeditionen til verdens ende (Expedition to the End of the World, 2013), music from Mozart’s Requiem sounds several times as Greenland’s melting ice and swelling ocean fill the screen. This recording is not mere ambience. The performance captured in a Copenhagen church sounds surprisingly provisional and fragile. Unlike the rhapsodic-atmospheric use of music in Werner Herzog’s environmental films, recent climate-science documentaries like Chasing Ice and Ice and the Sky, the Mozart fragments in Dencik’s film sound as contingent material artifacts of human presence in a rapidly dissolving visual landscape. In their brittle interruptions, they resemble the speech that makes song missed in Persephone in the Late Anthropocene. Closed-caption-style paratext throughout the film further amplifies this critical distance.

“Nonsense rides piggyback on sensible things”, declares professional sceptic and questioned-document analyst Joe Nickell concerning graphology. This chapter examines graphology’s enduring allure and reach, despite its controversies, and considers its relationship with other types of handwriting analysis. It first asks: is it possible to metaphorically “dissect” the page of handwritten texts, to scrutinize writing as a “medical paratext” rich in information about the writer’s state of health? It then interrogates the nature of the connection between physical and mental states and handwriting. It demonstrates how academics are going “back to basics” with their enquiries into individual difference and handwriting features, and how digital methodologies are contributing to this. Thus, this chapter is an updated study of graphology, providing a wider understanding of the concept of the paratext by considering the information captured in handwriting in the context of a digital age.

In this chapter, we define the sole form of text with which Bringing War to Book is concerned, the contemporary military memoir. We start by introducing the genre, and its twin goals of telling stories rooted in factual information about military participation, and presenting narratives which prioritise the individual, lived experience of that participation in texts which claim authenticity on the basis of the witnessing of events recounted. We continue this introduction by discussing the diversity of the genre and exploring the range of types of military memoir that our immersion in the genre has shown. We then outline three ideas which frame the social production of the military memoir and which thread through this book. These are the extent and limits of communicative possibility in these books, the role of paratext in these text-based accounts, and the way what we term ‘military literacy’ functions to help explain the journey so many individuals make, from military operative to published author. We conclude with an overview of the subsequent chapters, each framed by a specific question about military memoirs. In answering these questions, we show how accounts of war and military life in preparation for it are both figuratively and literally brought to book.

In this essay, Alessandra Petrina explores two early modern Scottish translations of Petrarch’s Trionfi, one manuscript and the other printed. Concentrating on the prefaces and dedications penned by William Fowler and Anna Hume, respectively, she shows how these paratexts underline the connections between the work’s elevated matter, the respective dedicatees’ aristocratic status, and the circle of intended readers. However, they also frame the conceptual complexity of Petrarch’s thought and signal the translators’ appropriation of his poem in a process of ‘transrecreation’ that draws him into an emerging Scottish canon of international works.

Tweed and Scott’s introductory chapter interrogates and contextualises the term ‘medical paratext’ within the fields of literature, pragmatics, and the history of medicine. The authors suggest that in a field where (often shifting) notions of authority, bodily autonomy and ethics are prevalent concerns, paratexts reflect and potentially shape wider anxieties about medicine and culture.

Hannah Tweed’s chapter, ‘Archives, Paratexts and Life Writing in the First World War’, focuses on critically neglected female nurse-writers from the First World War, and their implicit audiences. Concentrating on Canadian diarists Alice Lighthall and Claire Gass, Tweed suggests that the epitext and peritext were central to the diarists’ writing process and are subsequently key to reader engagement with these narratives. Tweed argues that the paratext of these diaries demonstrates the contemporary archiving and historiography of the authors’ experience, and supports their claims to authoritative writing—as military historians, medical practitioners, and as women operating within male-dominated environments. She presents Gass and Lighthall as self-conscious archivists, evident in the form, function, and interaction of the paratextual detail within their diaries.

This chapter outlines the many rich opportunities for discussion and analysis that can be catalysed through teaching crime fiction and film. Clearly organised into three case studies, the first reconsiders the value of the ‘canon’, in terms of the complex relationship between the BBC adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles and Conan Doyle’s original text. The second focuses on the classic Hollywood version of The Big Sleep as a means to explore celebrity and commercial culture. The third moves to address film in translation, and opens up debates about industry trends through a reading of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Throughout, the chapter is attuned to student feedback and responses, and is informed by the writer’s practical experience.

Bueno offers a discussion of how geek culture is found in literature, in an effort to expand the critical analysis of this topic beyond its presence in television and movies. Using examples from various literary works and drawing from concepts such as intertextuality, paratextuality, and hypertextuality, Bueno explores the nature of geeks and nerds and how they are found in novels such as Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The term geek metafiction, therefore, applies to the kind of literature where geek culture plays a central role.

Many of the misconceptions surrounding Mary Hays stem from the first edition of her letters The Love-Letters of Mary Hays 1778–1780 (1925) edited by her great-great-niece A. F. Wedd. This edition obscures the revolutionary feminism and unconventionality that brought Hays infamy in her time, depicting her instead as a satellite of the Wollstonecraft/Godwin circle. Wedd frames the early letters to replace Hays the revolutionary author with “Poor Mary” the sentimental heroine, a product of the conventions of her time rather than a contributor to its intellectual circles. This chapter shows that if we acknowledge Wedd’s biographical paratext as a constructed narrative, we can contribute to undoing the editorial reduction of one of the most innovative and actively intellectual women of the late eighteenth century.

This chapter presents the critically and commercially successful memoirs of Patrick Chamoiseau within the context of Martinique ’s status as a French Department (departement et region d’outre-mer). Approaching the memoirs through two theoretical texts that Chamoiseau wrote concurrently with them, the essay shows how he engages in a form of memory work in his creation of intimate archives that run counter to the colonial archive. Chamoiseau establishes particular modes of life writing that openly confront memory as a political process and a commercial venture, and that foreground memory as an agency itself rather than as a transparent lens to the past.

Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth has no documentable connection to William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. The existing similarities between the film’s plot and Hamlet depend on a loose structural homology between the two narratives, which depends in turn on the centrality to both of Freud’s family romance. Even more tenuous, the homology solidifies into identity based on the thinnest of evidence: the heroine’s name, Ofelia. A similar dialectic governs the novel and film Warm Bodies, a zombie drama that also has no discernible relation to Shakespeare—that is, until the late appearance of a balcony reunion between the zombie-hero R and his human love Julie. Here, the identification between novel and Shakespeare source depends on visual evidence from the film and the novel’s critical paratext in the blogosphere. The essay explores the scenes of recognition in these two instances of “accidental Shakespeare.”

This essay examines the ways in which a range of comic books are “elevated” to Shakespearean status through various paratextual apparatuses. Drawing on Gerard Genette’s formulation of the paratext, Christopher focuses on the cover images, jacket blurbs, and forewords of two distinct groups of comic books: comics whose connection to Shakespeare are explicit (Kill Shakespeare), and comics without an obvious connection to Shakespeare (Batman, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, Y: The Last Man). Arguing that paratextual apparatuses aid in the construction of “author fictions,” Christopher identifies a persistent pattern of literary and cultural credibility being established through a paratextual relationship with Shakespeare, so that some comics are eventually refigured as Shakespearean texts in their own right.

Adaptation studies have long focused on the relationship of the source text to the adaptation, and overwhelmingly on the relationship between fiction or plays and the films derived from them, frequently with a focus on the fidelity of the adaptation to the source. But there is a substantial difference between film adaptation and videogame adaptations, where the relationship between adaptation and source is vastly different. Games always insist on their positioning within a videogame genre rather than their status as adaptation, as shown by the example of The Lord of the Rings. As a result, the important source is the game genre’s history. This genre-driven focus renders the relationship between a game adaptation and its literary or filmic source text a paratextual one.

Within the context of the enormous growth of traveller-generated content (UGC), such as travel blogs, travelogues, and online travel reviews (OTRs), paratextual elements are of crucial importance for other users who can take advantage of the wealth of first-hand travel information available online. That is why a theoretical framework is proposed to treat, as a whole, OTRs and their surrounding paratextual productions as generated by the reviewer (UGC) and/or the webmaster (WGC). The framework is used to extract the image perceived by the traveller and transmitted by the webmaster through analysis of titles and other paratextual elements of a random sample of 300,000 OTRs of two tourist regions of the European Union. The findings in both regions are in agreement indicating that the most frequent keywords of UGC (good feelings) and WGC (destinations and attractions) are complementary.

The chapter discusses the results of a survey conducted among Polish readers of science fiction and fantasy aimed to characterize their attitude to English-Polish translation. The survey sought to test their perceived and actual level of linguistic and cultural competence, so as to define the extent to which translators could rely on the background knowledge of their target audience rather than explicate elements such as wordplays or intertextual references. The answers indicate the respondents might need translators to resort to techniques clarifying or substituting the original content; however, at the same time, translators are expected to remain invisible, which probably excludes overt or frequent cultural substitution from the list of available techniques. The survey also required respondents to choose between diverse values a translation could prioritize and establish the readers’ reaction. The key value seems to be faithfulness to the original, which can be allowed to overshadow translation’s clarity, euphony or consistency with other translations. Out of diverse translation techniques used to render particular types of challenging items, paratextual glosses appear to enjoy significant support. This may be related to the general expectation of faithfulness, understood as refraining to intervene in the translated text itself. Support for paratext, then, would be an answer to two issues the survey seems to signal: the expectation of non-intrusiveness and the risk of misinterpretation and confusion, should the readers be left to their own devices.