5/20/2023 0 Comments Act your age eve brown quotesWhat I’ll be looking at over 3 weeks are particular kinds of romance paratexts that do just that – influence how individual readers consume novels – but also how paratexts shape the way romance exists in the world. Genette argued that paratexts affect how readers receive the books they pick up. The term originated in the work of Gerard Genette, who titled his French-language book on the topic “Seuils” or “Thresholds.” Essentially, paratext is everything that meets the reader at the threshold of reading : what they encounter once they already know the book exists, but before they start to read it. This includes the obvious elements that come along with a book – front cover, back cover, blurbs, dedications – and the less-obvious things that live separately from it – reviews, things the author has said in interviews, artsy bookstagram photos, etc. Paratext is a catch-all term for the parts of a book that aren’t the narrative itself. This post is the first in a three-part series about romance paratexts.
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