Paratextual Analysis Research Articles

Seeking Asylum, Speaking Silence

“How could she ever put those terrible pictures into words?” (Naidoo, Truth 51). This question is at the heart of Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth (2000), which narrates the trauma of Nigerian asylum seeker children Sade and Femi as they flee to Britain. Speech and silence are ambivalent within the text, fluctuating in meaning dependant on the social context in which they are enacted. Showing this text to be primarily a narrative of activism, I explore how Naidoo’s representations of trauma inform her critique of the British immigration system. This text invites a reading that draws on recent postcolonial theories of trauma. Using both textual and paratextual analysis of the novel and Naidoo’s archive, held by Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books in Britain, I draw on Forter’s model of psychosocial trauma to demonstrate that the trauma the protagonists face is a result of their encounter with a racist society and bureaucracy. Reflecting Kertzer’s claim that social justice should be central in trauma narratives for children, Naidoo shows healing from trauma to be the locus of political awakening for both characters and implied reader. The aim of this article is to integrate contemporary models of postcolonial trauma with an understanding of the activist nature of Naidoo’s work, showing that in this sort of children’s trauma narrative, the site of healing from trauma is simultaneously the site of social change. Since the trauma that the child protagonists face is a social phenomenon, the speech that allows the children to begin to heal is similarly socially situated, and their healing is synonymous with social justice.

Casting for the Public Good: BAME Casting in British Film and Television in the 2010s

Abstract This article examines changes in casting practices which have begun to put black, Asian, and minority ethnic actors more regularly on British screens and in more significant parts. In the context of calls for improving BAME involvement at all levels of the film and television industry, I look in particular at how colour-blind casting has begun to have an impact on British cinema. The article looks initially at how calls for the campaign for changes entwine with the British tradition of public service broadcasting and examines the socially conscious criteria for casting introduced by the BBC and the BFI in 2016. I suggest that some of the ambiguous expectations of audiences in relation to colour-blind casting are similar to the potentially contradictory aspirations placed on institutions which receive public funding. In order to examine these issues in some detail, I draw on textual and paratextual analysis to demonstrate how frames of reference for understanding new approaches to casting can be found in recent period adaptations, a British genre strongly associated with whiteness by actors and critics. The examples discussed span the decade: Wuthering Heights (Arnold, 2011), Lady Macbeth (Oldroyd, 2016), and Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). The analysis demonstrates that while casting for the public good is becoming more common it nevertheless remains a complicated and controversial strategy.

From Margin to Mainstream: Retranslation of Early Chinese History

This paper sets out to examine the diachronic movement of the three English versions of Zuozhuan 左傳 (Commentary of Zuo) by James Legge ([1872] 1991), Burton Watson (1989), and Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg (2016) with the time span of nearly one century and a half based on paratextual analysis. Zuozhuan , listed as one of the thirteen ‘Chinese canons,’ is the core Confucian narrative history recording the turbulent period in the pre-Qin dynasty between 722–468 BCE. The current literature often involves the examination of its narrative, key words interpretation, and comparative study with other historiographies; however, there has been little discussion about the English translations of the historical texts. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti’s retranslation theory, the present study explores the retranslation of Zuozhuan in terms of the translators’ agency, the intertextual relationship with the other historiographies, and the role of history. Our results indicate that Legge explores the comparative and the scholarly value from the Victorian moral standard and Protestant ideology. Watson, by contrast, places priority on its narrative feature in the late twentieth century. Durrant et al. highlight literariness and the scholarly and the pragmatic value at the start of the new millennium. The research reveals the translators’ endeavor to change the status of early Chinese history from periphery to centrality through literary features and easier accessibility while preserving the academic value. This research not only sheds new light on the cause and value of the retranslations but also investigates the application of the retranslation hypothesis on the newly-targeted data of the historical canon.

Transhumanism, transmedia and the Serial podcast: Redefining storytelling in times of enhancement

The digital age has facilitated the creation of fluid, open stories that are subject to change as they unfold across different media platforms, each contributing to the story as a whole. Transmedia storytelling is also linked to transhumanism, a philosophy based on the idea that human limitations can be overcome through reason, science and technology to finally free us from the limitations of our bodies and minds. The concept of the literary has changed because the concept of the human has also evolved, as technology has been used to enhance both human capacities and storytelling through active participation, group work, and collective intelligence. This double enhancement that transmedia and transhuman storytelling entail is explored in this article through a textual and paratextual analysis of Serial, the world’s most popular podcast, which can help us redefine the present blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the new territory of the literary.

Li-qawmin yatafakkarūn(Q. 30:21): Muhammad Asad's Qur'anic TranslatorialHabitus

Recent decades have seen a focus on the translator as a socialised individual as one approach favoured in Translation Studies. Scholars have employed sociological concepts such as habitus (socio-cultural conditioning) and field (environment) as methodological tools in empirical translation research, yielding new and interesting perspectives on the process of translation. In the field of Qur'an hermeneutics, however, such methodological tools have not been applied systematically. The present article constitutes an initial attempt to address this omission, by delineating Muhammad Asad's habitus against the backdrop of his socio-political, cultural, and intellectual background in order to explore the significance of its impact on his The Message of the Qur'an. It will contextualise Asad's rendition of the Qur'an into English through comparative critical intertextual and paratextual analysis, thereby introducing the ‘realm of sociology of translation’, a Translation Studies perspective, into Qur'anic studies.

The Translator’s Ideology: A Study of Three Persian Translations of George Orwell’sNineteen Eighty-Four

AbstractThe ideology and worldviews of a community may be shifted and modified through social changes brought about by political upheavals. In a country like Iran, the Islamic revolution (1979/80) has played a major role in re-shaping the ideology of the governing body which among many other things involves modifications in the language policy. After the revolution, Persian speakers were encouraged to be more conservative in their use of language. As a result, those who tended to produce discourse which was more conservative and Islam-oriented became more popular and respected among the Iranian people. Ideology is one of the major factors which influences the manipulation of language use in translation. Prefaces and introductions which form the paratexts to a translated product often contain expressions of a translator’s ideology, and this usually manifests itself in the translation product. This study aims to describe the ideological impact of the social situation both in the pre- and post-revolutionary era in Iran on translations of George Orwell’s famous political novel,Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949) into Persian. This study will, therefore, compare the prefaces in three Persian translations ofNineteen Eighty-Fourwhich were produced before and after the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. The three Persian translations are by Mehdi Bahremand (1976), Zhila Sazegar (1980) and Saleh Hosseini (1982). This study employs Farahzad’s (2012) second dimension of the three-dimensional translation criticism model i. e. paratextual analysis alongside Lefevere’s (1992) theory of manipulation to investigate some of the lexical differences that manifest themselves in the pre-and post-revolutionary Persian translations ofNineteen Eighty-Fourwhich reflect the personal ideologies of the three Persian translators as explicitly or implicitly expressed in their prefaces.

The “Second” Bride

AbstractThis article contributes to the discussion of retranslation in Translation Studies through a case study on the retranslation of romance novels in Taiwan. Although retranslation has received some attention from translation researchers, most of the existing studies are based on examples of classic literature. In contrast, popular fiction like the romance novel remains relatively under-researched. In this article, paratextual analysis is applied to the publishing environment and marketing strategies for romance novels in order to explain why works of this genre – which are usually regarded as cheap and “throwaway” – are retranslated and how consumers are motivated to purchase such products. The findings suggest that the retranslation of best-selling romantic novels is a low-cost and low-risk investment for the publishers concerned. Such retranslations are promoted through three channels: via the branding of the retranslation as a “classic”; by persuading readers to believe that the retranslated version is more faithful to the original, and thus superior; and by introducing a different mode of consumption – a shift away from renting and towards the purchase of novels. It is argued that, for commercially-driven retranslations, market factors rather than the inherent features of the texts concerned provide a clearer explanation for the phenomenon of retranslation.

Marketing anime to a global audience: A paratextual analysis of promotional materials from Spirited Away

Abstract This article will focus specifically on the marketing materials utilized in the Japanese and American markets for Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away) (Miyazaki, 2001). That is to say, it takes a more in-depth look at the paratextual deployment of film posters and theatrical trailers. Building on the work of Rayna Denison, Keith Johnston and Eriko Ogihara-Schuck, this study delves deeper into the specific paratextual elements present within Spirited Away’s promotional ephemera. Focusing on two primary factors – branding and linguistics – the following campaign analysis examines the meaning behind the addition and elision of certain signifiers. By comparing the different versions of both posters and trailers, this article highlights areas of cultural difference, postulating that the anglophonic paratexts have undergone a process of Disneyfication. Finally, the author extrapolates the key selling points that are accentuated for both the domestic and global markets of Studio Ghibli films and then muses on the resulting hierarchy of brand networks that appear to have formed.

The secret lives of ebooks: A paratextual analysis illuminates a veil of usage statistics

This study applies the method of paratextual analysis to six electronic books, or ebooks, in an academic library collection at a small liberal arts college. Two books are selected from each of three platforms: ebrary, EBSCO, and SpringerLink. The characteristics of each book are described, including design and readership, as well as 2 years of usage statistics from the specific library, and altmetrics where available. The paratextual study leads to a closer investigation of the usage statistics themselves and concludes that despite industry standards, they are not calculated consistently across vendor platforms and that while these data are invisible to researchers outside of the library, there are also essential elements that librarians mistakenly take at face value when comparing ebook usage from multiple vendors.

Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research ed. by Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte

Reviewed by: Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research ed. by Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte Minjie Chen (bio) Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research. Edited by Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research is a valuable addition to scholarship on the origin and development of Irish children's literature. The twelve essays in the volume grew out of the National Collection of Children's Books (NCCB) project, which culminated in an online union catalog and database of over 250,000 children's books from five libraries in Dublin, dating from the sixteenth century up to 2014. The book's title is suggestive of methodological contributions, but the real focus and strength of this essay collection is that it builds an understanding of the history of children's texts, reading, and education upon a rich heritage of primary materials held in Dublin. The disjuncture between the aspiration of the title words and the essence of the volume is betrayed by the latitude of "approach," used in the introduction section to variously refer to method (how) and foci of inquiry (what) of the studies. The collection engages with children's literature through the lenses of history, education, and literature. A major part of the book traces the origin and evolution of Irish children's literature, highlighting early texts, key publishers, and significant authors and works from the end of the seventeenth century through the twentieth. Máire Kennedy captures evidence of Irish children as readers and target consumers of instructional and educational books during the eighteenth century. She discusses children's exposure to hornbooks and chapbooks; notes the rise of illustrated books; demonstrates her skillful use of a variety of sources such as booksellers' advertisements, publishers' ledgers and subscription lists, guides and advice on reading, and adults' accounts of childhood reading; and helps us imagine young people's access to and interaction with books as child-oriented literature gradually increased. Anne Markey's study is bracketed by two dates: 1696, when the earliest Irish-published textbook specifically aimed at young readers was issued (as discovered by the NCCB bibliographical project), and 1810, the year before the foundation of the Kildare Place Society in Dublin. Kennedy's findings notwithstanding, Markey points out the paucity of children's books in early eighteenth-century Ireland. Using British children's literature as a benchmark, she describes the Irish children's book market as dominated by instructional texts as well as by imported, translated, and reprinted works from England and France. She identifies key publishers and pioneer writers whose works, though modest in quantity, marked the birth of indigenous Irish children's literature and made important contributions to the development of English children's literature. Aileen Douglas's analysis focuses on the works of Maria Edgeworth, the most influential Irish children's author to have emerged by the end of the eighteenth century. Douglas sheds light on the dual nature [End Page 496] of Edgeworth's didacticism and argues that her Early Lessons series presents an innovative literary representation of children's selfhood. In her role as novelist/educationalist, Edgeworth not only imparts factual information and moral teachings but also demonstrates how child protagonists are able to learn and to improve through the process of "gradual instruction," a manifestation of her educational principles. Susan M. Parkes picks up in 1811 where Markey leaves off; she devotes her essay to the significant role of the Kildare Place Society (KPS) in producing widely disseminated reading materials for Irish children and in promoting mass education. Parkes attributes the success of the Society, which admired the Quakers, to the neutrality of its publications in terms of Irish identity and religious persuasion. Several major authors and canonical works from the nineteenth century onward receive close reading, paratextual analysis, and sociopolitical critiques in this volume, yielding insightful (re)interpretations. Ciara Ní Bhroin studies Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, the first collection of oral tales to have been published in Britain or Ireland. She examines how the collection underwent drastic transformations against the backdrop of cultural and political shifts in Ireland, beginning as an...

Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 by Matthew Payne

Reviewed by: Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 by Matthew Payne Jason Hawreliak Payne, Matthew. Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11. New York: New York UP, 2016. Pp. 288. $28.00. Matthew Payne's Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 offers an extensive, theoretically rich examination of how military videogames shape, and are shaped by, understandings of the War on Terror. The book strategically omits analyses of military-themed shooters broadly speaking-which may include series such as Halo and Gears of War–and instead focuses on games ostensibly set against the backdrop of the War on Terror. This emphasis on the War on Terror allows Payne to examine how videogames inform players' ideas about American exceptionalism, military heroism, and post-9/11 America itself. Blockbuster franchises such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six receive particular attention, but small, independent games such as Molleindustria's Unmanned are also discussed. Although this is not a novel area of inquiry, the book is nevertheless an important contribution to multiple disciplines, as I will detail below. The book takes at its starting point that meaning is contingent on innumerable factors both within and outside of the text. In the context of gaming, meaning is produced in part by a game's images, sounds, and rules, but it is also produced by paratextual components and player subjectivity. For Payne, marketing materials, community forums, geopolitical events, and a player's personal experiences all figure prominently in how meaning is ultimately negotiated between game and player. Although Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (2006) and more directly, T.L. Taylor's 2009 article "The Assemblage of Play" have provided similar complex analytical frameworks in a general context, Payne demonstrates the usefulness of these frameworks in application. Indeed, Payne's focus on discursive complexity within the context of war gaming is the book's greatest contribution to game studies. In recognizing the role of extraludic semiosis on a given play experience's meaning, Payne offers an analytical framework that is complex but pragmatic. As the book argues throughout, players do not enter games as a blank slate; rather, [End Page 512] they come to games as pre-existing amalgams of knowledge, experience, and expectations that inform their play experience. Furthermore, Payne persuasively argues that this is a two-way street: just as real life informs play, play also informs real life. Games are an important cultural medium and thus have the potential to inform opinions and attitudes about how we understand the world around us. The book is written for a broad academic audience. Its primary subject matter is war gaming and games culture, but it attempts to appeal to readers outside of game studies. In particular, scholars in fields such as military studies, media studies, and cultural studies will find something of value here. As is typically the case, however, this attempt to bridge multiple audiences is both a help and a hindrance to the book's readability. For audiences outside of game studies, the first 100 pages or so will be useful for bringing them up to speed on the core concepts, canonical jargon, and recurring debates within the field. The magic circle, narratology/ludology, and "here is why games matter" all make an appearance in the opening sections. This, of course, helps to foreground the discussion to follow, but it also means that scholars within game studies will retread some awfully familiar territory. Nevertheless, I would recommend against skipping or even skimming the opening sections as they contain important neologisms and definitions which are used throughout the book. The best example of this is "ludic soldier," a "playful subjectivity" that is defined as the culmination of "game design choices, advertising campaigns, and gameplay communities" (10). It would be difficult to fully appreciate Payne's analyses in later chapters without first becoming acquainted with his jargon. Playing War contains six chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion, but it can be roughly divided into three main sections: introduction, textual analysis, and paratextual analysis. The first section consists of the introduction and first chapter, in which Payne carefully...

Ancillary academia: video shorts and the production of university paratexts

ABSTRACTThis article considers the production of media paratexts beyond the bounds of the entertainment industry. Specifically, it examines the development of video content strategy by universities, and the paratextual function that video shorts serve in the construction of institutional identity. Taking a production studies approach, the article expands the scope of paratextual analysis by exploring the development of video content by university marketers, and the role of promotional intermediaries in selling video expertise to the education market.

Donna Williams’s ‘Triumph’: Looking for ‘the Place in the Middle’ at Jessica Kingsley Publishers

ABSTRACTIn order to examine the complexity of the autism memoir boom and its relation to the self-help ethos, we investigate published autie-biographies as part of a production cycle that has to negotiate between the demands of the individual’s unique story, the expectations of a community and a commercial rationale. More precisely, we focus on Jessica Kingsley Publishers (JKP), a leading international niche publisher in the field of neurological and cognitive differences. Firstly, we study the forms and formats offered by JKP as specific technologies of writing that affect the kind of identities that could be produced. Secondly, we focus on the ‘coaxing strategies’ that are used to streamline the life writing production. We investigate how JKP contributes to the proliferation of autie-biographies as well as to the creation of what Lauren Berlant has called ‘intimate publics’. Thirdly, we focus on the oeuvre of one of JKP’s star-authors, Donna Williams. By combining textual and paratextual analysis with qualitative data from interviews we will show how Williams exemplifies the quest and triumph ethos underlying the (commercial) disability memoir, while at the same time undermines and resists the notion of progress on different levels in her work.

On the transcultural rewriting of the Chinese play Wang Baochuan

ABSTRACTThe first English version of the Peking Opera Wang Baochuan, rendered as Lady Precious Stream, was translated by Chinese playwright S.I. Hsiung in 1934, when Chinese culture was little known to the Western world. This paper takes a descriptive approach to examine Hsiung’s translation and production of Lady Precious Stream in the historical context in which it was read, performed, and received in the target culture and to explore the reasons for the success of its wide reception in the Anglophone world during the 1930s and 1940s. Textual and paratextual analysis of the translated text reveals that Hsiung’s success depended not only on his skilful rewriting techniques and his deliberate use of paratexts but also on the influence of the patronage and the favourable political and social contexts of the receiving countries.

Italo Calvino, l’occhio che scrive. La dinamica dell’immagine autoriale di Calvino nella critica italiana

Italo Calvino, the eye that writes The dynamics of Calvino’s authorial image in literary criticism Italo Calvino has been quickly canonized in Italian literary criticism. Already during the lifetime of the Ligurian author a sort of ‘essential Calvino’ has affirmed itself in criticism. This essential Calvino is constituted by a conglomeration of images, ideas and keywords that define the author, at least according to critical consensus. This ‘essential Calvino’ has, however, not only been formed by critics, but certainly too by Calvino himself, who has contributed greatly to his own authorial image. By adopting various roles, from writer to essayist, editor, journalist and director of book series, Calvino managed to influence the reception of his works with a multifaceted authority. The aim of this article is to investigate how Calvino has become ‘Calvino’, the author whose critical image seems to have clear outlines. The idea of Calvino as a precise and geometrical observer, light but thoughtful, multiple but coherent, has been elaborated in a dialogue between the various ‘Calvini’ and literary critics. These images of Calvino do not only have direct and visible repercussions, but also more indirect and invisible consequences. In the case of Calvino, his metaphorical (but also biographical) marginality coincides with his place at the margins of volumes (on covers and in introductions) that he acquired early on in his career and that continues until this day. By interlacing a paratextual and discourse analysis with the institutional and cultural context of Calvino’s career, one can hope to gather a better insight into Calvino’s critical reception and the process of critical circulation and reception in general.

Words Not in the Story: Paratextual Analysis of Moral Education in a School Edition of Gulliver's Travels in China

As a world classic, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is on the compulsory reading list for elementary students in China, and many school editions have been published to meet this curricular requirement. This paper aims to reveal how the paratext, which is often neglected because of its peripheral position, contributes to moral education, especially in influencing young readers' positive interpretation of the protagonist. The two additional narrators which are introduced in the paratext by the translator/adapter form a dialogue with the main story and represent an effort to harness the story with a specific moral educational direction.

Legitimacy, self-interpretation and genre in media industries: A paratextual analysis of travel guidebook publishing

This article presents a paratextual analysis of a genre-specific case of the book publishing industry, namely that of travel guidebook publishing. Paratexts refer to all the ‘accompanying’ textual instances that gravitate around, but never completely pertain to, the ‘primary’, authorial text. In contrast to prevalent theorisations of paratexts as simultaneous hermeneutic and marketing frameworks that regulate a reader’s interpretive practices (reception) and/or media purchasing habits (consumption), I suggest that paratexts are vehicles through which media production companies engage in auto-communication, that is, self-interpret with a view to legitimating an ethical, virtuous and authentic institutional self. I furthermore suggest that a media company’s paratextual legitimation efforts unfold in reference to the genre, under the label of which its media products are produced, promoted and distributed. Genres are central to media institutions’ legitimacy, while the paratext is the principal conduit through which legitimation is conveyed.

Female Writing in Manuscript and Print: Two German Examples from the Cultural and Political Context of Late Seventeenth-Century Sweden – Maria Aurora von Königsmarck (1662–1728) and Eva Margaretha Frölich (?–1692)

Aurora von Königsmarck and Eva Margaretha Frölich, two noblewomen of German descent in late seventeenth-century Sweden, were both influenced by currents in contemporary theology and piety. Aurora von Königsmarck, her sister, and two of their female cousins formed a circle around the Swedish queen Ulrica Eleonora (the elder). Together they wrote strongly emotional religious poetry in German, which is preserved in an exquisite volume in the Uppsala University Library.Eva Margaretha Frölich expected the Swedish king Charles XI to play a central role in the imminent apocalyptic drama and become the ruler of the world. After she had been exiled from Sweden, she propagated for these views in a number of tracts published in Amsterdam.The present article explores some important paratextual features in ‘Nordischer weÿrauch’, the manuscript collection of religious poetry written in Aurora von Königsmarck’s hand, and in the works by Eva Margaretha Frölich. The discussion shows the importance of paratextual analysis for the interpretation of texts from the literary and intellectual culture of early modern Europe.

Preliminary norms in the selection of children's books for translation in South Africa

This paper presents the results of a macrotextual and paratextual analysis of a sample of 42 English and Afrikaans children's books (21 source texts and their translations). The sample consists of books for the age group six to 12, and includes readers and picture books, and books of South African as well as international origin. The aim of the analysis is to explore some of the preliminary norms that may influence the selection of books for translation in the Afrikaans/ English language pair. In this, the focus is on perceived function (specifically as evident in paratextual material), cultural content, and verbal style, as three dimensions that may affect text selection in particularly salient ways. The analysis (primarily of the source texts) indicates potentially significantly different selection criteria for different subgroups of children's books (for example, readers and picture books, local and international books, Afrikaans and English books).