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What is close reading and what are the steps we take in close reading as a methodological approach? This article explores reading strategies and advocates for a more conscious close reading. Starting by tracing the hermeneutic heritage of close reading, and examining its development from the New Criticism movement onwards, it then describes the fundamental physical and cognitive aspects of reading as a distinct form of analytic attentiveness. Three methodological steps are delineated, discussed, and exemplified through the author’s close reading practices. By employing a paratextual lens to the close reading of manuscripts from the Early Modern period, the article demonstrates how theoretically informed readings, such as the paratextual perspective, enhance the reading process and deepen our understanding of historical conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late 19th-century Singapore is considered the centre for the printing and distribution of Muslim-Malay lithographed texts in the Malay archipelago. In 1890, the island's print output was approximately six million pages, with many of these printed from lithography. Thus informed, our recent readings of Singapore's role in regional histories of the printed book tend to locate its prominence along contemporary, national lines – this is anachronistic. The island, historically, was neither nation nor state, but a British colonial settlement. Singapore's advantageous geographical position certainly established it as a prominent site for book production and distribution. However, the existing corpus of lithographed publications, printed at multiple localities, indicate a broader range of regional locations involved in Muslim printing. These texts, from mushaf to syair, often feature printed defects and paratextual marks on their pages. Informed by approaches from analytical bibliography and printing history, the materiality of these marks and defects can be 'read' to identify specific print production techniques. These, in turn, suggest printing methods that were common in British and Dutch territories, and beyond – an indication of the mobility of techniques, materials, and practitioners within the lithographic trade, and the collaborative nature of print enterprises in the Malay world. By discussing these printed marks, this article will (a) re-situate and revise our understanding of interactions and practices within the Muslim-Malay lithographic printing trade; and (b) posit the notion that late 19th-century Singapore is not the locus, but one of several sites of significance within a regional 'constellation' of printing activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicated upon a corpus of 4,200 films, this article documents, analyses, and interprets the international film industry's rhetorical disavowal of the comic book medium as a source for adaptation within advertising and promotional rhetoric for the cinematic adaptation of comic book texts. By analysing the statistical trends and patterns for comic book adaptations between 2000 and 2020, examining the language used within promotional trailers to conceptualise or promote the feature adaptation in relation to their comic book source material, and by comparing the type and scope of this rhetoric with other adapted texts of the same period, this article evidences and interrogates the overwhelming disavowal of the comic book medium despite the persistent and widely perceived ubiquity of comic book adaptation franchises. Above all, this article utilises statistical evidence and analysis to evidence clear patterns and trends within the perceived hierarchies of cultural taste or artistic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks whether and what differences exist between the notions of pseudotranslation and partial cultural translation. Although they are both ultimately untranslated texts, their respective definitions acknowledge the possibility that each category may be taken as a translation. To answer its research question, the article examines the distinctive features of pseudotranslation and partial cultural translation across three primary sources that showcase traits common to both categories. First, the analysis sets these two notions against the backdrop of a fictional subtext which informs translation theory, demonstrating how pseudotranslation and partial cultural translation feed into this subtext. It then goes on to investigate the function of paratexts and culture-specific items in the three primary sources. Finally, the article identifies the different intentions underpinning pseudotranslation and partial cultural translation: while the former explicitly aims to be perceived as a translation, the latter is not written to be consumed as a translated text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delves into the analysis of two versions of Ksawery Pruszyński's work dedicated to the Spanish Civil War: the original Polish edition published in 1937 and its Spanish translation by Katarzyna Olszewska Sonnenberg and Sergio Trigán, released seventy years later in 2007. Considering translation as a phenomenon of cultural rewriting (Lefevere, 1992), we will observe how both versions of the book generated creative actions. In the original Polish text, these actions focused on a series of historical, political, and cultural correspondences between Spain and Poland, manifested through abundant intertexts. In the Spanish translation, the action related to the edition of explanatory-interpretative paratexts. Both rewritings underscore the substantial mediating function of the translating activity, along with its cultural implications.

Sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers were preoccupied with reflecting on the nature of the mind. A vast array of authors seized upon the opportunities offered by new and established literary genres to explore the place that the mind held as a governing force of the human individual, but little attention has been paid to the portrayal of minds suffering from creative frustrations of a non-romantic nature. My article establishes the importance of this literary topos in respect to Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay (1573), Nicholas Breton's A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers (1575), and George Gascoigne's The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575). I explore the prefatory materials of each collection to reveal their shared concern with the ways that the mind can be corrupted, and perhaps cured, by the labor of poetry creation. More specifically, I trace the notion of the bruised brain as it appears in the prefatory poems of Whitney's Nosgay to Gascoigne's Posies to establish new points of connection and potential influence between these authors, in addition to shedding new light on an underappreciated aspect of Elizabethan poetic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genette's Seuils considers the dramatic paratext as the odd one out, and, indeed, the early‐modern theatrical paratext has remained understudied. This article discusses the paratexts of the comedies of Giovanni Battista Calderari, a sixteenth‐century author quite neglected by scholars, whose works were published in Vicenza and Venice. By focusing on the paratexts of La Mora (The Moorish Woman, 1588), La schiava (The Slave Woman, 1589), and Armida (1600), the article stresses Calderari's attempts to clarify his poetic ideas and his endeavours to create a network of intellectuals and obtain their opinions about his work. These interlocutors belonged to the knights of Malta and the Vicenzan Accademia Olimpica, two circles to which Calderari himself belonged, but they also were authoritative Venetian intellectuals. His insertion of poems and letters that praise his person and work, reveals his attempt to promote himself and his writings. He tries to promote himself not only as a military man or a great Vicenzan poet, but as a scholar of theatre who is able to juggle poetic discourse and is worthy to be considered by intellectuals, though he ultimately seems to have failed to really assert himself on the Venetian cultural scene and the Vicenzan stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spelled in several different ways, the word 'doubt', usually in the plural 'doubts' (dubbi, dubitazioni) appears on the frontispiece of several works printed in Venice and elsewhere in Italy in the sixteenth century. Building on different traditions, ranging from the pseudo‐Aristotelian Problemata to Medieval didactic literature, these texts, normally in the vernacular, address questions that the average reader may have on a variety of topics: from thermal baths to indulgences, from natural philosophy to duel. While usually the term 'doubt' means 'question', things can be sometimes less straightforward, especially when it comes to religious texts or works penned by unorthodox writers, as in the case of Ortensio Lando's Quattro libri di dubbi. This article will explore paratextual elements of works addressing doubts focusing on a variety of topics such as readership, definitions of doubt and its function, the role of these works in the dissemination of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay addresses the Secreti diversi et miracolosi, one of the many 'books of secrets' (collections of medical and craft recipes) which crowded the sixteenth‐century Venetian book market. First published in 1563 and spuriously ascribed to the physician Gabriele Falloppia, this book was already subject to significant structural changes in its second edition (1565). The editors of the first and second editions, Giovanni Antonio Di Maria and Borgaruccio Borgarucci, discussed their respective choices concerning the arrangement of the collection in their prefatory letters. This essay examines the prefatory and organizational paratexts of both editions, which reveal a tension between the readability of the book and the reliability of its contents. It argues that the different paratextual strategies pursued by Di Maria and Borgarucci had a profound impact on the contours of 'Falloppia"s literary identity, the functions envisioned for the collection, and the epistemological value of the recipes therein. The editorial history of the Secreti diversi also prompts broader considerations on the popularity of books of secrets, showing how this was not only a matter of content but also, and often more importantly, how that content was presented to the readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article presents the framework and contributions of the special issue Paratexts, Dissemination, and Book Market in Early Modern Venice (1500‐1650). This volume aims to shed a new light on the publishing activity of poligrafi and other figures operating in Venice and its area of cultural influence. In this context, the use of paratexts simultaneously serves to disseminate knowledge, portray self‐fashioning strategies, and respond attentively to the market's and readers' needs. This collection of essays highlights how paratexts can provide valuable insights for analyses grounded in different disciplines and methodologies. Indeed, the present issue brings together studies that examine paratexts from a literary, historical‐cultural, and linguistic perspective. The authors explore aspects of early modern culture that are relevant but still neglected in modern scholarship and thereby advance our understanding of writing and publishing as a complex modality of cultural exchange from the Cinquecento to the beginning of the Seicento. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the construction of a common enunciative identity in a set of paratexts belonging to a corpus of works that contain texts translated by María Elena Walsh and Elsa Bornemann, namely La nube traicionera (published by Sudamericana in 1989) and Antología del cuento infantil (published by Editorial Latina in 1977). From a methodological framework that considers situations of enunciation and communication, as proposed by Maingueneau, I will attempt to demonstrate that the discursive manifestations found in this corpus reinforce author-translators' positioning as part of a groundbreaking literary-discursive tradition in Argentina. This literary and discursive disposition is characterised, among other things, by political commitment and a poetics that proposes novel, unprejudiced ways of looking at the world, far removed from indoctrination in all its shapes and forms. To complement this exploration, I will also venture towards a characterisation of the communicative identity of the enunciator, which ultimately constitutes the translator's ethos (Spoturno), as a relevant aspect for theorisations of Translation Studies in the field of children's and young adult literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Or le-'et 'erev was the most popular missionary pamphlet printed by the Pietist Institutum Judaicum et Muhammedicum in Halle (Saale). This Yiddish booklet garnered much attention among Jews and Christians alike, and it was translated into several languages, including Dutch. One Dutch translation was penned by a Jewish convert who later reverted to Judaism and faced various accusations relating to his translation. This article focuses on that Dutch translation and the largely unknown personality of its author. The translation and its accompanying paratexts are compared with another eighteenth-century Dutch translation of the same pamphlet, thus shedding light on the translation techniques used, as well as the nature of the work and its intended audience. The translator's multiple identities appear in a diverse corpus of documents under several aliases. In his largely unknown Hebrew apologia, Or le-'et boker , which demonstrates a profound knowledge of Judaism as well as remarkable literary skills, he rewrote the story of his reconversion as a tale of repentance and redemption. Despite the idiosyncrasy of this fascinating life story, which transitions between Christianity and Judaism, the translator should be viewed as belonging to a larger group of less-known eighteenth-century Jewish authors and reformers. The members of this group sought to improve piety and religious education among their coreligionists and shared eighteenth-century Christian pietist notions of religiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before and after a book there is a series of texts around it with different functions; these are the paratexts and they are always present to a greater or lesser extent. As doenças do Brasil, by the Portuguese writer Valter Hugo Mãe, draws attention because it contains paratexts in profusion: titles (of the novel, of the parts and of the chapters), summary, preface, epigraphs, dedication, afterwords, presentation of the author and of the book (on the back cover). In this work is mentioned practically all these paratexts; however, despite it starts from the title of the novel and above all the word diseases (physical and/or metaphorical), it focuses its reflection on the epigraphs, the dedication, and the afterwords. The theoretical references, among others, are the studies of Susan Sontag (1978), Gérard Genette (1987), and Antoine Compagnon (1996). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to discuss Ana Cristina Cesar's correspondence with Luiz Augusto Ramalho while he was studying in London, in 1969. The letters were published in Amor mais que maiúsculo, by the editors of Companhia das Letras, in 2022. Reflections will be made on literary sources and archives that made the publication of the book possible, as well as a conceptual discussion about the concept of correspondence, autobiography, and contemporary Self Writing. Also, the text will look at letters as historical documents and paratexts. For this to happen, the authors André Luiz Anselm (2015), Philippe Artières (2013), Leonor Arfuch (2010), Michel Foucault (1992), Regina Kohlrausch (2015), and Philippe Lejeune (2014), among others, will be used. As a result, the letters are seen as an attempt to remember a love that is about to end. Furthermore, the presence of the Brazil-England relationship and foreign expressions in the correspondence transform them into a paratext for the César's scholars.

This study aims to understand how Chinese audiences have consumed and engaged in BBC's Sherlock as a transcultural fan with the help of digital media. Drawing on the transcultural and gendered fan studies and 36 qualitative interviews, this article interrogates Chinese Sherlock fandom within the hybridised transcultural flow of texts and identity. The key argument is that Chinese Sherlock fans have created a female-dominated fandom that updates the gendered fandom by enriching paratexts of Boys' Love (BL) whilst China's censorship has largely constrained fans' homosexual productivity. On the one hand, the wide application of digital media technologies largely helps Chinese fans to access Sherlock transnationally and contribute to the global Sherlock fandom; on the other, the censoring mediascape in China has restricted fan prosumption, as erotic/homosexual fan work is not regarded as a canonical culture. This study thereby concludes, although Chinese Sherlock fans have been cultivated to circumvent the media censoring mechanism and produce fantexts outside China that features resistance power and fan intelligence, the compromised fan culture is understood as incomplete rebellion because Chinese fans have made concessions and the alternative choices are tacit by the national power itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As revisionist studies have recently shown in the wake of Gérard Genette's Seuils (1987), editorial paratexts in translated works, such as prefaces and illustrations, are valuable documents for capturing the ideological parameters which early modern publishers and translators had to skilfully exploit to promote their work. A case in point is the little known yet important eighteenth-century collection of framed-novelle Les Journées amusantes (1722–31) by Madeleine-Angélique Poisson de Gomez (1684–1776). Through the lens of intertextuality and intericonicity, this article offers a two-part analysis of the paratextual material (verbal and visual) contained in the foreign editions of this work. It evaluates the strategies which 'image-makers' used to ensure the legitimacy of a text which was originally written by a woman. In particular, it highlights transnational instances of dialogic interplay and cultural transfer, allowing for a better understanding of the female writer's status across Europe and revealing the cultural and pedagogical parts which translators, publishers and engravers played in the formation of eighteenth-century European readerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on examples from recent promotional campaigns created by streaming platform Netflix, this article reflects on translation and media paratexts from an interdisciplinary perspective. It includes discussion of marketing approaches, political and commercial constraints and priorities, theoretical frameworks, and future directions in media paratext research. It also introduces and contextualizes the contributions included in the special issue Media Paratexts and Translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses Netflix Turkey's media paratexts in which Netflix's foreign productions and Turkish originals are promoted by the creative use of local elements and/or culture-specific references. It aims to identify the role of translation in these paratexts in promoting both Netflix and its shows such as Stranger Things among others in Turkey. It also discusses the functions of these paratexts in relation to their socio-political contexts of production and the wider debates around regulation and censorship in Turkey. The analysis shows that translation and localization in the selected paratexts serve to make the foreign shows relatable, evoke a sentiment of nostalgia and create a sense of belonging. Further, the paratexts on Netflix Turkish originals highlight the untranslatability and culture-specificity of Turkish expressions to appeal to the viewers' national pride, which is arguably informed by a populist approach due to the increasing possibility of restrictions on content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fans' relationship with media product franchises is strongly based on the symbolic value and sense of belonging that nurtures their consumer practices, a fact that indicates the love relationship with these brands. Entertainment brands increasingly resort to paratexts in order to expand their relationship with fans. Thus, the aim of the current research is to investigate how the paratextualization of franchise productions by the entertainment industry is used to trigger love towards their brands. In order to do so, it applied the Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to news reports and information published on websites of three of the most successful brands in the entertainment industry, namely: Star Wars, Wizarding World and Game of Thrones. Based on the results, these brands promote both the value and the continuity of the aforementioned sagas as means to develop an affective brand for their fans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of a translator’s paratext offers greater visibility to the translator and a direct source of information on his/her decisions and intentions. Osório de Oliveira, the translator of the Portuguese version of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, replaces the author’s original preface with one of his own in which he justifies the alterations to the original text, whilst underlining that it was a Portuguese vessel on its way to Brazil which saved the hero from his desperate plight. This paper proposes to examine the reasons for Oliveira’s emphasis on this particular episode, to the detriment of others which were unquestionably more interesting within the context of the hero’s adventures. The date of publication of the translation – 1940 – and consequently of the paratext, provides the principal key to the answer, as the ideology of the Estado Novo was founded on the exaltation of the Portuguese “Discoveries”, underpinning a colonial policy which supposedly justified the retention of the “Overseas Provinces”. The paper discusses the translator’s reasons for intervening in the target text, whilst attempting to evaluate how far the paratext may have mediated the reception of a final version in which the deeds of past heroes were exploited in an attempt to appropriate Defoe’s story.

As on-demand media claim an increasing amount of the time we spend on digital media, traditional broadcasters have adopted video on-demand (VoD) services as a means of presenting their programmes. This article analyses two Danish VoD services offered by legacy broadcasters – that is, BVoD services. It argues that the traditional features of broadcast television, to communicate liveness and immediacy, are reappropriated in the publishing practices of the BVoD services. With an analytical focus on the use of temporal paratexts, the article finds that whereas both services emphasise liveness and immediacy in their publishing practices, they apply different means of expressing the temporal qualities. These differences can be attributed to organisational differences. Finally, the article concludes that competitiveness, distinctiveness, and the public service identity of the broadcasters are explanatory factors for the reappropriation of time-structured publishing in the two Danish BVoD services DRTV and TV 2 Play.

This study focuses on paratexts as recontextualization tools, specifically prefaces written for (re)translations, and problematizes Turkish (re)translations of modernist novels written in English, which, for reasons of morality, encountered legal difficulties, and were stigmatized, banned, or confiscated in the source culture. Recontextualization resonates with (re)producing ideologies, exposing various agents' deliberate power positions in determining discourse structures within the more general framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. Against this backdrop, this study, which is part of a larger project, has a twofold purpose: a) to evaluate 15 prefaces extracted from (re)translations of 10 modernist novels as a tool for recontextualization; and b) to investigate the preface discourse regarding the transfer of modernist novels into the target culture through the lens of transitivity analysis, based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) model. SFL proposes that the main system by which experiential meaning is associated with process choices within the framework of ideational meta-function is transitivity; transitivity analysis is therefore applied to the prefaces to unveil the relationships established between the processes and the actors. The analysis of findings revealed that recontextualization was functionalized to create an explicit, rather than an implicit discourse structure through the intensive use of material processes. It concludes that prefaces written to (re)translations in Turkish context, as liminal devices between the fictitious and real worlds, are clearly instrumentalized to position the key players in the adaptation, promotion, and representation of these books within their new cultural context, and thus, were designed to influence the discourse surrounding the transfer of modernist novels into the target culture.

This article attempts to answer the following question: why did the author of the apocryphon called 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John choose to efface himself and adopt John as his pseudonym? Why not Peter or Paul? This paper argues that the author of 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John intended to harness the audience attached to John, the seer of Revelation, by taking his name as a pseudonym. This paper sustains this claim by demonstrating that, in antiquity, each author had a specific pool of readers, often made out of friends and accolades of the author. Thus, authors’ names evoke an audience attached to them. When an author takes another person’s name to write under, he does so out of necessity, because he does not have an audience. But, when he takes another’s person name, he does so hoping to trick the audience of the impersonated into reading him. Based on this insight, this article concludes that the author of 1 Apocr. Apoc. John wanted the readers of canonical Revelation to engage with his work and that he achieved his purpose as evinced by the fact that the titles of both works share an uncanny resemblance, ranging from identical titles to similar wording. Since titles in antiquity were given to the works by their readers, the most logical explanation for canonical Revelation and 1 Apocr. Apoc. John having the same titles is that they both shared the same readers. Finally, this article argues that, in line with recent research on the use of pseudepigraphy in Jewish, Christian, and Roman contexts, the author of 1 Apocr. Apoc. John wanted to be read by CR’s readers because he wanted to expand, criticize, rework, and update CR’s eschatological discourse, exemplified by a close reading of how 1 Apocr. Apoc. John criticized, reworked, and updated CR’s presentation of the resurrection to bring it in harmony with late Christian reflection on the subject.

This article demonstrates how the concept of paratexts can be employed in the analysis of unfolding sports events. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Gray and Matt Hills, it reflects on the "extended presence" of sports events across media, space, and time - how meaning is created before, during, and after their apparent conclusion, and how their mediated "centres" appear to move in the process. By way of illustration, it examines a boxing event in early 2023 involving the popular British boxers Chris Eubank Jr. and Liam Smith; however, it focuses on the events before the event - namely, the preceding press conference and weigh-in - and suggests that these "entryway events" were paratextually significant in shaping expectations and attitudes towards the "main event". The article also demonstrates how sports events feed into wider processes of social inclusion and exclusion, often acting as lightning rods for public discussions of socio-political issues, such as race, class, gender, and (in this case) sexual orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper studies the Spanish translation of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. It observes the effects that institutional and self-censorship have had in Andrés Bosch’s version, first published in 1968 by Lumen as Las Confesiones de Nat Turner. Presented as the fictional autobiography of a historical figure, the novel is based on a failed revolt that took place in a Virginia plantation in 1831. The source context is described and contrasted with the target one, paying attention to the paratexts that have conditioned the novel’s reception in Spain. Accessing the General Archive of the Administration shows that Bosch’s translation was self-censored in a possible attempt to avoid the institutional intervention that would have delayed the book’s publication. Research also shows that this same version is the one being republished in the early twenty-first century.

The apocryphal account of the birth and childhood of Mary, mother of Jesus (and to a lesser degree Jesus himself) known most commonly as the Protevangelium of James is one of the most influential early Christian texts outside of the New Testament. It is witnessed substantially in the Greek manuscript tradition as well as in several other languages. In the process of its transmission in Greek from the late third century or the fourth century into the late medieval/early modern period, various titular formulae were attached to the text. This article examines the earliest manuscript witness for Prot. Jas, Papyrus Bodmer V, and argues that the title present here is reflective of the complexities surrounding the perceived genre and function of early Christian literature in addition to the creation and continuation of traditions encompassing authorial identity and legitimacy. The Prot. Jas demonstrates well the hermeneutical weight often carried by titular paratexts as literature is transmitted, and regardless of whether P. Bodmer V represents continuity or evolution in this regard, it offers a window onto the flexibility of genre and its representation in early Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qur'ān translations are forms of traditional or rational tafāsīr [exegeses]. Laleh Bakhtiar, an Iranian-American who converted from Christianity to Islam, applied a rational approach in her Qur'ān translation. Extensive research has surveyed Bakhtiar's feminist perspectives (Kidwai, 2018) and her reliance on dictionaries (Hassen, 2012). However, the investigation of the influence of her Sufī views on her translation has not been previously addressed. This paper is an empirical account of the impact of Bakhtiar's Sufī belief in futuwwa on her translation choices. To achieve this goal, Bakhtiar's translations of the verses that include the term فَتًى fatā [a young man] and its derivatives are analytically compared to Sufī and Shiʿī translations to analyse Bakhtiar's choices and highlight her adaptation of allegorical hermeneutics. The underpinning approach of this paper is a combination of Gerard Genette's paratexts (1997) and Hussein Abdul-Raof's criteria of the Sufī approach to Qur'ānic exegesis (2012). The main finding is that by adopting al-bāṭin [esoteric] meaning and rejecting aẓ-ẓahir [exoteric] meaning, Bakhtiar goes far away from orthodox Islamic traditions in her interpretation of the Qur'ān. Moreover, through applying the concept futuwwa to men and women, she deconstructs the patriarchal framework, in which the virtue of futuwwa exists, and expands the connotative meaning of this aspect, which results in sending radical messages completely different from those in the source text. Future researchers can broaden the scope of the analysis and examine a plethora of contemporary Qur'ān translations to explore the effect of the translators' beliefs on their interpretations of the Qur'ān. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the context of the Spanish edition of the Ksawery Pruszyński’s collection of reportages, En la España roja, written during the writer’s trip to Spain as a press correspondent in 1936, in the early months of the civil war. Despite the passage of time, Pruszyński’s observations still hold interest and offer insight to the Spanish reading public. The aim of the article is to examine how the ongoing debates surrounding the Spanish Civil War, intertwined with postmemorial discourses, influence both the publisher’s presentation of the book and its reception by critics. To accomplish this, the paratexts of the Spanish edition of Pruszyński’s work will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coming-of-age of digital media has transformed the translation landscape, (con)fusing to a certain extent the Source and the Target. Not only has there been a shift in the way the agents of a translation interact with the text, but source text readers have also been brought into the picture as potentially important players in the (co)production of the target text. Using the controversial Wuhan Diary about the Covid-19 crisis in China as a case study, this paper examines the role of source text readers as censors of the paratexts of the Diary's English translation. The active participation of source text readers created much tension with the source text author, and also gave rise to conflicts with other agents such as the translator and publisher. The resolution of what were often ideological conflicts was reflected in the fluidity of the paratexts of the target text, a fluidity facilitated and enabled by digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a corpus‐based linguistic analysis of the paratexts of the works of John Pechey (1654–1718), a licentiate physician and prolific medical author and popularizer, whose ideas and practice brought him into conflict with the Royal College of Physicians. Following the methodology of corpus‐assisted discourse analysis, historical discourse analysis, and historical sociopragmatics, the essay analyses the paratextual material of Pechey's medical publications, with the aims of (a) collecting a corpus of texts published under his name, (b) assessing his role in the popularization of learned medicine, and (c) tracing how he constructed and performed his identity both as a knowledgeable medical practitioner and as a critic of the beliefs and practices of the Royal College of Physicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the Korean translations of a Japanese work Joshi no rongo [女子の論語/Women's Analects] (Yuki, Ako [祐木亜子]. 2011. 女子の論語. Tokyo: Sunmark Publishing House), a modern interpretation of the Chinese classic The Analects, with a view to identifying how the paratexts of a translated text contributed, or hindered the reception of the work in the target culture. By drawing on Gérard Genette's (1997 [1987]. Paratexts: Threshold of interpretation, Jane E. Lewin (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) concept of "paratexts," this study both analyses translation shifts in the peritexts (e.g., cover, foreword, table of contents) and the epitexts (reviews) of the Korean translations. The analysis shows that the additions and rearrangements of some paratextual elements in the Korean translation further reinforced the traditional view presented in the source text, which ironically brought about heavy criticisms of the original Japanese text and resulted in the Korean retranslation of the work. The scrutiny of peritexts and epitexts in this article will enhance our understanding of the interactions between the translator, the publisher, and the public readers, which jointly contextualize the production and reception of a translated work in a given culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the history, conceptualization, and development of the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams, an ongoing research project hosted at Ghent University. It also offers a glimpse into current and future research threads carried out within the project, with an eye on long-term sustainability. The first part of the paper pinpoints the position of DBBE within the broad field of Digital Humanities and addresses the question of how and why Byzantine metrical paratexts have been collected in an open-access online database. In the second part of the article, we describe the main features of the relational database currently available, both from the perspective of its users and from a technical point of view. The third section of the paper includes the description of four subprojects connected to DBBE, which at present involve the development of a graph database complementary to the relational one, the implementation of natural language pre-processing applied to the DBBE corpus, the linguistic analysis of formulaicity in book epigrams, and the exploration of the broad implications of the study of book epigrams for a better understanding of Byzantine book culture.

The recent expansion within early modern studies of the application of the generic label “life-writing” has led to the recognition of the literary and cultural value of an array of previously undervalued texts, particularly those written by women. The inclusion of texts that previously sat outside the canon has proved them powerful enough to disrupt and complicate understandings of the genre, and beyond this, the very paradigms upon which the study of autobiographical writing was historically predicated. This article combines close readings with material analysis of three female-authored autobiographical manuscripts to suggest that, contrary to Western, Protestant and masculine assumptions, these pious seventeenth-century women perceived of themselves primarily not only as authors but readers of their own divinely-authored life stories. Focusing primarily on the paratexts attached to life narratives of Mary Ward (1585-1645), Dionys Fitzherbert (c.1580-c.1642) and Elizabeth Isham (1609-1654), it identifies – across the Reformation confessional divide – common semantic and grammatical patterns which demonstrate that these texts advocated and illustrated particular reading strategies that encouraged their audiences too to see their own lives as texts to be read. It argues that Mary Ward’s Ignatian-inspired texts in particular represent a radical reimagining of the exemplary function of women’s lives.

An Utile Dulci for Youth: Ungdomens bibliotek as Book Series and Publishing Project The Swedish publishing house Svensk läraretidnings förlag published the extensive book series Barnbiblioteket Saga (the Children’s Library Saga) between 1899 and 1970. In this article, the publisher’s less extensive book series Ungdomens bibliotek (the Library of Youth) is analysed as an example of the marketing techniques that the publishing house used to reach different target groups. The article investigates how the publishing house used their smaller book series as a way to diversify and increase visibility for their books at a time when the main series Barnbiblioteket Saga was growing into a vast phenomenon that was becoming increasingly difficult to overview. This is investigated through an analysis of the book series’ paratexts, drawing on different theories from the field of publishing studies about the marketing of literature. The article focuses on marketing – through the book covers as well as material inside the books – and advertising. The study provides an explanation of how the publishing house used their marketing of Ungdomens bibliotek to strengthen their brand and expand their business from the 1920s through the 1940s. They accomplished this by developing strategies for curation: they curated a book series targeted for a more specific audience segment than the larger Barnbiblioteket Saga, while also emphasising the qualities that were associated with all their work: pedagogy, accessibility, richness (in subjects and variety), and formation.

Engaging with a text allows one to enter a flow state through the actions or reading/viewing a narrative or event. Spoilers, which provide information about the text but bypassing the intended reading path as set out by the author, can serve to interrupt a state of flow, dissuade one from even attempting to interact with the text at hand, or catch one’s eye to an interesting aspect that would normally be hidden. In this study, I classify spoilers through Genette’s concept of paratexts and how they affect one’s wellbeing through the notions of Seligman’s PERMA theory (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishments, with specific focus on aspects of engagement. Throughout this work, I denote different aspects of spoilers as found in examples of popular culture to establish how these paratexts can hinder or help in one’s engagement with a potential text and how these can affect one’s wellbeing. In order to help readers avoid unwanted spoilers. I also include how different elements of digital media can be adapted in order that one obtain such information only if one desires it to make an informed decision as to whether or not engage with a specific text.

We can now see in the public sphere almost everything written by Karl Marx and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Both are widely read, and both have had major impacts on how many people, if not all in some way, understand political activity. Both were prolific writers, but their ideas would exceed the forms in which they were expressed. Access to even their most intimate writings—diary, drafts, notebooks, personal letters—perhaps allows us to better see, in a retrospective way, their thinking unfold. Looking at private correspondence, notebooks and diaries of famous political figures reveal writing as a tool of self-clarification, providing insight into the labour required as a prelude to formal publication. Seeking out how public texts were rehearsed and assembled in more intimate forms for the ears of others also raises questions about who gets to write and read, and of course, what is retained and what is excluded by publication. Comparing Marx's notebooks and drafts with Capital or Gandhi's daily diary with its published versions might mean asking different self-clarifying questions, in our different contexts of distraction. And of Marx and Gandhi, might we ask if it is still possible for someone politically engaged to write all the time? An emphasis on "adversaria" may itself be a privileged diversion, available only to those who will be measured in turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a world-famous writer and translator, Lin Yutang is recognized as a cultural ambassador who dedicated his entire life to cross-cultural communication between East and West. His translation works are of great significance in promoting cultural exchange between China and the West. Taking his English translation of the Chinese canon Dao De Jing as a case study, this article conducts a thorough analysis of paratexts in translation and discusses how paratexts help the translator interpret the source text and introduce Laozi's thoughts for western audiences. More importantly, it explores the mediating functions of paratexts in facilitating target readers' understanding and reception of the original text. The study demonstrates that paratexts in translation provide an effective platform for translators to interpret the source text and facilitate the target reader's comprehension and perception of the source culture, thus highlighting the essential characteristic of translation as a cross-cultural communication activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media product franchises often play the role of brands based on the elaboration of cultural schemes. They use complementary contents to their products' narra-tives - called paratexts - to keep a long-lasting relationship with their consum-ers. Thus, the aim of the current study is to investigate how the paratextualiza-tion of franchise products of the entertainment industry generates cultural schemes for their brands. To do so, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis was applied to news reports and information published at the official websites of three em-blematic entertainment industry franchises: Game of Thrones, Star Wars and Wizarding World. Results have indicated franchises' focus on maintaining and expanding fans' experience with these sagas, evidencing the existence of a cul-tural scheme to build experiential brands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present investigation, the importance, on the one hand of the paratexts of grammars and dictionaries -as well as other types of documents- of Spanish missionary linguistics is revealed; and, on the other, the awareness that the religious had before the variety of the languages of the native peoples. Through a bibliographic review and a study of the prologue to the Art of the Mixtec language (1593) by Antonio de los Reyes, the aim is to understand the reason that led the missionaries to describe one linguistic variety over another. Before examining de los Reyes' prologue, the decisions made by other religious when faced with the same problem in Nahuatl and Quechua are briefly exposed. Thus, it can be verified that, ultimately, the substantial reason that causes the selection of a specific variety for its codification is evangelization; that is to say, that the religious who learned Mixtec from Teposcolula could communicate -to transmit the faith to them-with all the speakers of that language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]