The paratext thus is empirically composed of an assorted set of practices and discourses of all sorts and of all ages, which I incorporate under this term in the name of a community of interests, or convergence of effects, which seems to me more important than their diversity of aspect. […] The final rejection of everything which I christen epitext is probably in this respect particularly arbitrary, for many future readers get to know a book thanks, for example, to an interview with the author–when it is not thanks to a newspaper review or a recommendation by word of mouth. The latter, according to our conventions, do not generally belong to the paratext, which is defined by an intention and responsibility of the author; but the advantages of this grouping will appear, I hope, superior to its disadvantages.
An element of paratext, at least if it consists in a materialized message, necessarily has a positioning, which one can situate in relationship to that of the text itself: around the text, in the space of the same volume, like the title or the preface, and sometimes inserted into the interstices of the text, like the titles of chapters or certain notes; I will call peritext this first spatial category, which is certainly the most typical and which will be the subject of our first eleven chapters. Around the text again, but at a more respectful (or more prudent) distance, are all the messages which are situated, at least originally, outside the book: generally with the backing of the media (interviews, conversations), or under the cover of private communication (correspondences, private journals, and the like). It is the second category which I will christen, for want of a better word, epitext, and which will be the subject of the last two chapters. As should be obvious from now on, the peritext and the epitext occupy exclusively and exhaustively the spatial field fo the paratext; in order words, for those who like formulae, paratext = peritext + epitext.