When a book is translated, publishers will often modify or completely change the cover design. This paper examines the similarities and differences that result in a sample of cover designs taken from ...Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. The essay analyzes these images as a form of intersemiotic translation, which prioritizes the marketing apparatus of a novel over its narrative content.
The rise of LGBTQIA+ and queer young adult (YA) literature has led to an increased diversity in the range of texts available for young readers. The covers of these texts use various design elements ...to market to their target audiences, employing signifiers to indicate a narrative’s queer themes that range from subtle coding to explicit representation. This article presents findings from a qualitative research study at a regional university in Australia, which explored reader responses to peritexts used by queer YA books in a context where book bans that target marginalised identities, including queer identities, are increasing around the world. Queer-identified research participants aged 18-30 engaged in focus groups, discussing and analysing pre-selected queer YA texts over the course of eight months. Participants had a range of responses to the peritexts, including finding that signifiers of queer themes were affirming to their own identities and could be indicators of allyship in public spaces. Participants also discussed the potential risks associated with publicly consuming a book explicitly presented as queer through its peritext, emphasising concerns around vulnerability, exposure, and a lack of safety. This article uses a theoretical framework of critical social theory and queer theory to shed light on the relationship between peritext and reader response in queer YA literature, providing insights into how these elements contribute to readers’ understanding and engagement with queer narratives, and the potential value of peritext for queer and non-queer audiences.
Though there has been some critical writing on fat poetics, this is the first article that examines the visual rhetoric of book covers by fat-identifying poets. Positing that covers are a distinct ...way to intervene against anti-fatness, the article uses Charlotte Cooper's theory of micro-fat activism and combines esthetic analysis of the covers' art and design with theoretical, social analysis of the covers' meanings. This article analyzes Samantha Zighelboim's cover of The Fat Sonnets through a diet culture, disciplinary lens rooted in eating disorder research, while Sigmund Freud's theory of The Uncanny helps elucidate the cover's visual terror. Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and Sabrina Strings' research on the racist, Protestant origins of fatphobia are used to analyze Diamond Forde's cover of Mother Body through an intersectional perspective. Forde's cover celebrates the fat, Black, female body; reclaims Cooper's "headless fatty"; and re-writes the Edenic myth. Combined, these covers critique diet culture and present a fat-positive solution to anti-fatness.
This essay offers close analyses of the dust jacket illustrations for Hemingway's early Scribner publications (The Sun Also Rises, Torrents of Spring, and A Farewell to Arms). While these ...illustrations seem, at first glance, to have little to do with the books' narratives, themes, or styles, they serve at least two functions worth recovering. First, the illustrations work to locate Hemingway in literary and cultural traditions whose values were understood and largely shared by the mainstream book-buying American public in the 1920s. In addition, informed by the discourses of paratextual theory and book studies, I argue that they are influential early interpretive readings by the jacket designer, interpretive thresholds informed by the illustrator's own understanding of the texts and their value.
This study is an analysis of the book cover images of a selection of Swedish crime literature, published in Greece and the Spanish-speaking world in the period of 2000-2017. Covers are crucial to the ...paratextual signal system (Genette, 1991); departing from theories on paratext within translation studies, we aim to compare the original book covers to the covers of the translated volumes. Do the Greek and Spanish book markets emphasise the stereotypical images of the North that have been identified in studies on borealism (Chartier, 2008)? The image covers of the original and the translated editions were examined by means of a content analysis, complemented by an empirical study. The examination of the sample did not unambiguously indicate that the translated editions draw more heavily on the Nordic origin. Similarly, not all covers of the translations revealed belonging to the crime genre.
In the era of globalization, institutional translation has become increasingly important. The Panda Books Series (PBS) is an exemplar of institutional translation that translates and disseminates ...Chinese literature to other parts of the world. The present study provides a multimodal analysis of the book covers in the PBS in terms of their visual meanings and intersemiotic relations. Analysis of 129 front covers and 64 back covers reveals that a positive and non-threatening image of China is constructed by characterizing China as a gender-equal, peaceful, and rural country, while a modern and approachable image of Chinese writers is created to highlight the authorship. The verbal and visual modes that are present on the covers often repeat the same information to reinforce positive images of China and Chinese writers, which is instrumental in realizing the goal of the PBS. It is argued that the agency of subjects at different levels, that is, the political ideology of the state, the governmental institutions involved, and translators and editors, all combine to shape the book cover designs of the PBS. This study contributes to research on institutional translation, especially state translation program, from a multimodal perspective.
In this article we examine eighteen selected nonsense anthologies published in the UK since the 1920s, working on the assumption that they define, re-shape and visually reinterpret the genre for a ...general audience in parallel to scholarly approaches to nonsense. In the first part of our paper we look at the process of anthologising and its main functions, followed by an overview of key nonsense anthologies. In the second part, we inspect peritexts that influence the reception of these collections and, by extension, the perception of literary nonsense, looking specifically at book titles, cover designs, tables of contents, prefaces and postfaces. In doing so we hope to reveal the implied reader of the anthologies, comment on their coverage relative to the established Victorian canon and recognise the distinctive features of the genre, foregrounded by the anthologists’ editorial and aesthetic choices.
In this article we examine eighteen selected nonsense anthologies published in the UK since the 1920s, working on the assumption that they define, re-shape and visually reinterpret the genre for a ...general audience in parallel to scholarly approaches to nonsense. In the first part of our paper we look at the process of anthologising and its main functions, followed by an overview of key nonsense anthologies. In the second part, we inspect peritexts that influence the reception of these collections and, by extension, the perception of literary nonsense, looking specifically at book titles, cover designs, tables of contents, prefaces and postfaces. In doing so we hope to reveal the implied reader of the anthologies, comment on their coverage relative to the established Victorian canon and recognise the distinctive features of the genre, foregrounded by the anthologists’ editorial and aesthetic choices.
This paper is premised on the assumption that Young Adult Literature (YAL) is a relatively new development in Kenya, having been neglected both in research and production of books that promote the ...Young Adult Fiction (YAF) genre. The genre has been overshadowed by adult literature and, often, submerged in and or mistaken for children literature, thus denying its existence. I argue that the book as a material object, invites a symbiotic relationship between itself and all other discourses surrounding the text. With reference to Gerard Genette's paratextual model, I examine how repoussoir, an element of paratext at the epitextual zone, has been exploited in selected YAF produced from 2005 to 2015 to evince YAL in Kenya. Repoussoir demonstrates its significance as a functional tool that aids in the texts' identification, definition and presentation. It mediates between the eye of a book's customer and the internal text that the entire book purposes to deliver. Consequently, repoussoir stands out as a cardinal material parameter that contributes to the formation of the text, advertising it, masking and / or cueing its meaning.
This article investigates how the covers of two novels, Vaffelhjarte (Waffle Hearts, 2005) and Tonje Glimmerdal (Astrid the Unstoppable, 2009) by the Norwegian children’s fiction author Maria Parr, ...are visually and verbally translated into German, French, and English. The central question of this study is how representations of characters, theme, and geographical context are rendered in the target text paratexts. Methodologically, the study is inspired by Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design. The results show that the target paratexts to a large extent reflect the novel, but in different ways and not necessarily by staying close to the source paratexts. Previous research on paratexts and translation shows that exotic source text elements tend to be foregrounded in translation. This is something that we also see regarding the French and the British Parr translations, but not the German. Drawing on previous research by Kathryn Batchelor and Maria Pujol-Valls, we would like to put forward the hypothesis that verbal text – that is, the narrative in the novel – and paratexts behave differently in translation. As verbal text, according to previous research, often is more adapted to the target culture when migrating from a peripheral system (Norway) to more central ones (France and Great Britain), the opposite seems to be the case for translated paratexts, where exotic source culture elements are reinforced in central systems. Concerning the German cover, where there was no foregrounding of exotic source culture elements, we raise the possibility that such foregrounding is not needed, since German readers are already familiar with Scandinavian children’s literature.
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