The beginning of ‘The End’: terminal paratext and the birth of print culture

Abstract

. . . print is comfortable only with finality. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982) In Gérard Genette’s foundational survey of the liminal features in texts that we now (thanks to him) call ‘paratexts’, he discusses book and chapter titles, authors’ names, publishers’ imprints, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, footnotes, post-publication interviews and even public reviews, but he does not devote a single word to the conventional forms developed to bring books to a close. Genette never intended his account to be exhaustive: he uses his ‘Conclusion’ to acknowledge that ‘this inventory of paratextual elements remains incomplete’ and to outline some of the areas that he has knowingly ignored. But conclusions themselves are not among them, nor are afterwords, postscripts, codas, epilogues, envoys, explicits, mottos, colophons, privileges, registers, errata, subscription lists, advertisements, ornaments, end-papers or any of the other features that have been used over the course of many centuries to mark the ends of books.

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