Sub-Project Paratexts in Late Imperial Chinese Book Culture (MC 4.3)

Project Leader: Joachim Kurtz

Paratexts such as book jackets, prefaces, epilogues, colophons as well as seals, marginal notes, illustrative materials, etc. are indispensable parts of the public and private histories of any book. According to G. Genette, who coined the term, paratexts are what enables a text to become a book in the first place: thresholds of interpretation that authors, editors and others can use to frame how readers approach the work’s main text. The book culture of late imperial China was an unusually fertile ground for the production of framing paratexts. Present in virtually every book published in the Ming and Qing dynasties, paratexts served as strategic platforms for commercial, epistemological and ideological negotiations between authors, publishers, and readers. This project reconstructed the complex paratextual landscape in late imperial Chinese book culture and attempted to redefine the paratextual genre as a global phenomenon.