THE LITERARY WORK consists, exhaustively or essentially, of a text, that is to say (a very minimal definition) in a more or less lengthy sequence of verbal utterances more or less containing meaning. But this text rarely appears in its naked state, without the reinforcement and accompaniment of a certain number of productions, themselves verbal or not, like an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations. One does not always know if one should consider that they belong to the text or not, but in any case they surround and prolong it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb, but also in its strongest meaning: to make it present, to assure its presence in the world, its “reception” and its consumption, in the form, nowadays at least, of a book. This accompaniment, of varying size and style, continues what I once christened elsewhere, in conformity with the frequently ambiguous meaning of this prefix in French–consider, I say, adjectives like parafiscal or paramilitary–the paratext of the work. Thus the paratext is for us the means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers, and more generally to the public.
Furthermore, the presence surrounding a text of para-textual messages, of which I propose a first summary inventory which is probably in no way exhaustive, is not uniformly constant and systematic: there exist books without a preface, authors who refuse interviews, and periods have been known where the inscription of an author’s name, and even of a title, was not obligatory. The ways and means of the paratext are modified unceasingly according to periods, cultures, genres, authors, works, editions fo the same work, with sometimes considerable differences of pressure: it is a recognized fact that a “media dominated” period multiplies around texts a type of discourse unknown in the classical world, and a fortiori in antiquity and the Middle Ages, periods in which texts frequently circulated in their almost raw state, in the form of manuscripts lacking any formula of presentation.
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.