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This chapter is concerned with the many translations of Antigone from 1900 to the present, and with some of the ways in which these diverse translations establish for the reader without Greek the normative Antigone against which more radically transformed Antigones will be seen. It investigates selected aspects of text, paratext, and intertext, exploring translators' variously and subtly transformative choices as conditioned by their approach to translation, their choice of form and level of diction, and their interpretation both of the play as a whole and of particular passages. The chapter concludes by noting several features in the most recent translations that tend to enable a reading that is more aware of the relation between original and translation and between translation and reader.

Combining paratextual and textual analysis with an examination of contemporaneous reviews and external marketing, this chapter explores how women travellers position gender identity as a key selling point of their travelogues. The first section considers the travelogue’s paratext, including titles, bindings and frontispieces, and their intended impact on the purchaser. It then moves from a comparison of prefaces and narratorial positioning to a study of content in these Oriental travelogues, suggesting that the gender ambiguity introduced by vagabondage is central to their commercial attraction. Having briefly discussed the question of metatext, the final section addresses the figure of the author, interpreting reviews and public appearances by these women travellers as a form of external marketing for the travelogue. Debunking images of the humble author pushed into publishing by mistake, this chapter shows how women travel writers from 1850-1950 commodify themselves within and without the text, using their bodies to market their travelogues, literally selling the skirt.

This chapter turns to the frame narrative of The Monastery, and several other types of paratext in the Waverley Novels, in order to focus on the careful constructions of authenticity which, for many readers, mark the difference between the Waverley Novels and Gothic. Since authenticity presupposes authority, the apparent absence of authority during the years of Scott's anonymity has recently received a great deal of attention from critics, who have analysed in detail Scott's habit of ‘keeping you all this while in the porch, and wearying you with long inductions’, as Dr Dryasdust describes it in the Prefatory Letter to Peveril of the Peak. The frame narratives of the first editions of the Waverley Novels–with their extended play between competing antiquaries, amateur historians, and gentlemen of leisure of varying degrees of dignity and trustworthiness–are now well-charted demonstrations of the complex interplay of authority and authenticity in Scott's work. It is fitting that comparable critical discrimination should be shown when considering Scott's later, more seductive, and more lastingly authoritative, authenticating voice: that is, the autobiographical voice introduced in the Magnum Opus edition, in which Scott creates an authorial persona whose pronouncements about origins and authority have been more difficult to refute than those of Peter Pattieson or Dr Jonas Dryasdust.

This chapter shifts the arguments from antiquarian writers to antiquarian readers by exploring how early modern poets took up the antiquarian baton. It focuses on Michael Drayton, Camden's close friend and the most antiquarian of all English poets, and in particular on Poly-Olbion (1612 and 1622), his massive antiquarian and chorographic epic. With its elaborate paratext and its scholarly apparatus, courtesy of John Selden, Poly-Olbion offers an exemplary study in both antiquarian reading and in the production, publication, and reception of early modern antiquarian books. As well as the familiar context of Camden and his confrères, the chapter also locates Drayton's work in a less known, but long established, tradition of antiquarian poetry. Through the example of Drayton, therefore, it explores how poets more generally responded to and shaped the forms of antiquarian writing that emerged at the time.

The book concludes a brief case study of the ode, whose complicated evolution in the Romantic period encapsulates the generic currents and counter-currents traced in previous chapters. One of the oldest and most conventionalized of genres, the ode now underwent frenzied innovation and experiment, towards internalization and self-reflexivity in one development, towards greater ideological utility in another. Paradoxically, Romanticism witnessed the genre's greatest flowering but also its incipient demise. The ode's dominance in the poetic hierarchy (making it a ‘royal genre’, in Opacki's sense) is suggested by its aesthetic accomplishments and by its influence on neighbouring genres; yet increasingly the ode is displaced into other lyric forms, and odic devices begin to function independently of the ode form itself. This presents problems of classification—when is a transformed ode not an ode?—illustrated by writers' hesitation over generic labels and other paratexts.

Chapter one examines how drama was enacted in textual form upon the paper stage, outlining how writers used the medium of print to appropriate pre-civil war drama as a way to comment upon contemporary anxieties regarding war and the closure of the playhouses. Informed by recent discussions regarding the formation of the nascent public sphere, it offers a reappraisal of the Habermassian public sphere, presenting a more fluid form of public-making and making the case for the importance of story telling as a way to enter the public realm. The chapter also discusses how drama operates and participates in the public sphere to enact political grievances through an examination of woodcuts that accompany three play pamphlets that were printed in the mid-seventeenth century.

Drawing from two disciplines, memory studies and theories on life writing, this chapter aims to interrogate different reworkings, negotiations, and representations of memory and forgetting in memory texts in order to investigate how writing on remembrance/forgetting influences literary form. The chapter will provide an analysis of texts which use paratextual devices such as extensive footnotes, corrections, or multiple narratives, in order to accentuate the complications of writing memory. The focus is on particular representations and rewritings of the past, which for one reason or another, cast doubt on their own veracity and referentiality, and therefore align themselves more with the forgotten rather than remembrance. In these cases forgetting can be seen to take on form in narrative; as scenes of forgetting are apparent for instance where the gaps, the forgotten, the mis-remembered, is constantly drawn attention to. By analysing texts that bring to the foreground the memory processes at work in autobiographical writing, we can gain insight, not only into the nature of experimental texts of this type, but into autobiographical writing in general.

This chapter focuses on paratext that is typically considered extradiegetic, and as such it is often experienced as optional. Readers can say that they have read Middlemarch without reading every single epigraph; they can certainly ignore footnotes at will, especially if they were written by an actual editor. Indeed, fictional paratexts may be more powerful than scholarly ones. Autographic notes are perhaps more significant for most literary readers than are allographic additions. The chapter also consider paratexts—both epigraphs and footnotes—in Middlemarch, Catherine Parr Traill's The Canadian Crusoes, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and José Rizal's Noli Me Tangere as a way to examine bibliographic metalepsis: the infinite library that lurks in the margins of the text, and sometimes breaks through them because of the force of an allusion, the impact of information, or the oddness of bits of text attached but also detachable from the “main” text we read.

This chapter considers how a volume such as this was celebrated and advertised locally, and how Fawwaz’s contemporaries ‘blurbed’ it for audiences. How did such a framing contribute to the era’s discourse on women’s rights? It then turns to Fawwaz’s attempt to send her volume to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair and her correspondence with Berthe Honore Palmer, chair of the Board of Lady Managers. It sets this venture into the context of the Women’s Building and Library founded for the Fair and the American founders’ attitudes toward feminism, international collaboration, and the female populations of societies colonized by European powers. It traces Arab women’s response to the Chicago venture, focusing especially on Hanna Kurani who spoke at the Congress of Women. It also sets Arab women’s attempts to participate in the Exposition within the reaction in Egypt to the way Egypt was represented at the fair, and the controversial presence of dancers who were allegedly from Egypt, in the Midway’s Egyptian café.

This chapter outlines the approaches, definitions, and theories used throughout the book, before giving a structural overview of each chapter. Firstly, the chapter directly addresses the accusations of gimmickry that have been directed towards extreme art film, mapping the reception climate and evaluating the most popular and widespread responses. From this, it becomes clear that a lack of attention has been paid to the commercial identity of the film, and the way extremity informs its commercial persona. Thereafter, the chapter historicises extreme art cinema, positioning it as an outcome of taste slippage, and the blurring of boundaries between art cinema and exploitation cinema. By paying particular attention to representations of the body within both highbrow and lowbrow cinema, the chapter argues that convincing similarities exist between the cinematic traditions. Additionally, the chapter challenges the popular Francophile definition of extreme art cinema, broadening the geographic scope of the field by looking at films from Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Italy and Belgium. Finally, the chapter introduces paratextual theory, and details the way the preeminent ideas will be applied to the discussion of extreme art film paratexts.

Using Paul McDonald’s, Barbara Klinger’s, and Jonathan Gray’s work on the home entertainment industries, this chapter positions the DVD and Blu-ray as a fundamental paratextual form. Establishing it as a bearer of meaning capable of changing the commercial identity of the film, the chapter stresses the role these objects play in shaping the cultural persona of a film. The chapter then outlines the marketing practices that have historically defined art and exploitation cinema. The chapter highlights the consistency in which art film distributors have promoted the figure of the auteur and the country of origin on marketing materials, while foregrounding existing critical acclaim and any film festival success (such as awards, nominations or appearances). The chapter then explores exploitation marketing, charting the frequency with which distributors opt to use ballyhoo dares and promises in blurbs or taglines, the regularity with which they knowingly select images that disgust and provoke, how they will act quickly to milk cinematic trends, and effectively turn critical condemnation into hyperbole. Finally, the chapter places the book’s discussion of the home entertainment product alongside other studies of taste slippage, extending the histories established by the likes of Mark Betz, Joan Hawkins and Kevin Heffernan.

This chapter uses a historically and geographically mobile approach to map a range of films and filmmakers often absent from discussions of extreme cinema. The chapter starts with an exploration of the extreme works of directors like Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman and Roman Polanski, stressing their importance to the creation of an extreme art aesthetic. The chapter focuses on the paratextuality of these filmmakers, and studies DVD and Blu-ray versions of their more extreme texts. Focusing closely on how exploitation marketing traditions co-exist with their art film counterparts on these objects, the chapter highlights the complexity of extremity’s commercial identity. The chapter takes the same approach to its study of European exploitation cinema. Using home entertainment paratexts to highlight influential films, the chapter investigates companies such as Arrow Video, Vipco, Anchor Bay, BFI and Redemption DVD, paying special attention to their handling of a range of directors, including Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, and Jean Rollin. The chapter underscores the crucial role exploitation cinema had in shaping extreme art cinema and highlights the contradictory role extremity performs within the commercial sphere.

This chapter continues the selective history of extreme art cinema instigated in Chapter 3. Focusing predominantly on the releases of Artificial Eye and Tartan Video, the chapter details the re-emergence of extremity in France during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and looks at the paratextual treatment of Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, and Claire Denis. Thereafter, the chapter expands its geographic lens, and examines extreme art production across Europe, with analysis of The Idiots, Man Bites Dog, Tesis, A Hole in my Heart and Dogtooth. The separation of New French Extremity from other forms of European extremity allows the French films’ impact to be appropriately measured. In essence, the chapter argues that the success of the New French Extremity changed paratextual representations of extremism, making them more popular, common and commercially viable. Thereafter, the chapter considers extreme horror narratives such as Martyrs, Frontier[s], and Switchblade Romance, outlining the way they influence and become influenced by paratextual images of extreme art cinema. By adopting this structure, the chapter again exposes the importance of both highbrow and lowbrow taste within the conceptualisation of extreme art cinema.

This chapter examines the extreme cinema of Michael Haneke. Whilst increasingly well covered in scholarly accounts of extreme art cinema, Haneke’s work is most often approached from an aesthetic and thematic point of view, wherein the text becomes the focal point. While these studies are key to understanding Haneke’s films, and the metaphorical significance he places on scenes of brutalism and sex, it has left certain areas underexplored. This chapter addresses this by undertaking detailed paratextual analysis of Haneke’s key extreme films. Firstly, the chapter focuses upon Funny Games, the most critically disliked Haneke film. Looking first at Tartan Video’s release before discussing Artificial Eye’s remediation, the chapter highlights the important role time can play in defining the commercial validity of extremity. Showing how the growing status of Haneke’s auteur brand challenged the use extreme iconography, the chapter alludes to the ways highbrow commercial symbols compete with lowbrow traits. Thereafter, the chapter undertakes an assessment of Artificial Eye’s ‘Michael Haneke Trilogy’. This example – due the centralisation of a dead pig on the cover – exposes the way paratexts can oppose critical and cultural canonisation.

This chapter uses paratextual evidence surrounding the publication of William Faulkner’s story “Two Soldiers” in the Saturday Evening Post to argue for the importance of considering Faulkner’s works within their original contexts. An examination of the contents of the magazine, including editorials, articles, and advertisements, from immediately before Pearl Harbor through the appearance of “Two Soldiers” on March 28, 1942 demonstrates that its purchase and publication occurred during editorial and ideological upheaval at the Post; in just under four months, the formerly isolationist Post became a mouthpiece of the overwhelmingly patriotic sentiment sweeping across the nation. When placed within this context, Faulkner’s story offers a nuanced challenge to this rapid repositioning for an audience bewildered by the speed of this change. Rather than being a shortcoming of the story, as traditionally argued, Faulkner’s acute awareness of his audience and social context offers a compelling reason this story deserves further consideration.

This chapter argues for a cultural awareness of retconning through an exploration of retroactive continuity in the realms of parody, satire, and play. For a piece of parody to be successful, an author requires that the audience has a knowledge of that which is being referenced. The opening of the chapter, then, explores various moments satirizing the concept and usage of retroactive continuity. The second half of the chapter examines several texts that, while not exactly parodying retroactive continuity, do play freely with the concept to such an extent that they place all of literature, retroactively, within the same fictional realm. These texts often engage in their own form of subtle satire, and require a vast network of paratextual knowledge (referring to ancillary works related to, but separate from, a central text) for full appreciation by readers.

This chapter uses Gérard Genette's idea of the paratext to interrogate the development of prefaces to Latin poetry. It shows that the prefaces of Claudian and Prudentius are distinct from earlier poetic forms, and addresses the prose prefaces of Ausonius in terms of the poet's construction and imagined reception of his work. Because a paratext stands apart from the work, it allows the author a space in which to read his own poem. In this way, prefaces allow poets to enact for their readers one possible approach to the text. Claudian, Prudentius, and Ausonius use their prefaces to invite, to interrogate, or sometimes even to ward off the reader's influence over their text.