'All the Rest Is Propaganda:' Reading the Paratexts of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Abstract

Looking at two early editions of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, we encounter what looks like two different books. One is the novel's first edition, published in hardback in 1958; the other is the first paperback edition, published in 1960 by Pan as a film tie-in. The literary text inside the covers is in each case the same: what is outside is different. The literary text is presented with certain accompanying productions which constitute what Gerard Genette has termed the ‘paratext’. Such productions include the book's title, its cover, the ‘blurb’ and all the paraphernalia surrounding the text itself. The paratext also includes material surrounding the literary text—such as reviews, interviews, posters, advertisements—which are not materially attached to the text. In both cases, the paratext provides what Genette calls ‘thresholds’ to the text which work to ‘frame’ our experience of it. In this essay I examine the paratexts of these two editions of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to ascertain how and why they assumed their different ‘frames’. Although we traditionally study the literary text itself as the primary focus of investigation, what do we find if we shift our attention to the perimeters of that text? What was happening between 1958 and 1960 to make the same text appear so different? How did the film contribute to the paratextual reconstitution of the paperback, and vice versa?