University of Heidelberg

I. Outline 

Paratexts are ancillary verbal and visual productions, ranging from book jackets, prefaces, tables of contents, and colophons to seals, marginal notes and illustrative materials. As such, they are an indispensable part of the public and private history of any book. According to the French literary theorist Gérard Genette, who coined the term, the paratext is in fact what enables a text to become a book in the first place, functioning as a threshold that invites readers to step inside or turn back. It is through this liminal space that authors and editors can structure and control their readers’ approach to the book’s main text. Therefore, paratexts have developed into highly dense and complex spaces, involving a heterogenous set of practices, discourses and conventions.

The book culture of late imperial China was an unusually fertile ground for the production of paratexts. Paratexts had a place in virtually every book published in the Ming and Qing dynasties. As has been argued by Kai-wing Chow in his pioneering chapter on the topic, late imperial paratexts, rather than just being dispensable ornaments, provided a highly sensitive environment that enabled authors, editors and readers to convey conflicting, competing, and at times subversive messages.

Despite their ubiquity and relevance, paratexts in late imperial Chinese book culture have received no more than limited and fragmented attention. Our workshop was designed as a first step to correcting this oversight. Its design grew out of a panel we convened for the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. Exploring the functions of a few selected forms of paratextual writing, the panel argued that late imperial paratexts served as strategic platforms for a broad variety of commercial, epistemological and ideological negotiations between authors, publishers and readers. Building on these preliminary findings, the workshop intended to expand our understanding of the complex paratextual landscape in Ming and Qing China and helped to complete our picture of late imperial Chinese book culture. By bringing together sinologists with specialists in other disciplines, we hoped to highlight the specificities of paratexts in late imperial Chinese book culture and redefine the paratextual genre as a global phenomenon.

II. Possible Themes

We envisioned the papers presented at the workshop to address, among others, issues related to one or more of five thematic sections:

1. The Forms of Paratexts

The goal of this section was to define the scope of paratextual production in late imperial China. Besides identifying and classifying the most common types of paratexts, it tried to delineate the often pliable boundaries between a book’s ‘body’, or main text, and those elements that may be regarded as performing paratextual functions. Of particular importance here was the question of what Genette labelled as ‘epitexts’, that is, the problem of how to define, categorize and retrieve paratexts which, rather than being materially appended to the text within the same volume, were circulating in the virtually limitless physical and social space of late imperial book culture.

2. The Making of Paratexts

This section focused on the concrete modes of production and materiality of paratexts. More specifically, contributions explored printing, typography, calligraphy, layout, collation and related practices. In addition, this was also the place for assessments of the actual quantity and internal hierarchy of paratexts within different genres and types of books.

3. The Languages of Paratexts

This section explored the linguistic dimension of paratexts, including their style, rhetoric, modes of argumentation, and generic conventions. Multilingualism, especially in Qing times, is another relevant topic to be considered in this context.

4. The Authors of Paratexts

This section explored different strategies used by writers to incorporate in their own paratexts all sorts of (auto)biographical traces, including gender, local context, social status, official authority, imperial power, etc. In addition, it tried to explore the extent to which self-effacing and self-aggrandising as well as pseudo-allographic and other tactics of authorial diversion tended to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, present and past, China and Japan/Europe, etc.

5. The Functions of Paratexts

This section investigated the concrete uses to which paratexts were put in relation to their main texts. Depending on the content and the targeted readership of the book they accompanied, paratexts served a wide array of purposes, ranging from officialising, labelling, and advertising, to directional, didactic, classificatory, ludic and many other functions that can be analysed in this context.