![]() In order to further discuss intertextuality, Zhao Yiheng suggests that texts other than the main text should be classified into several types of ‘paratext’. The world of fictional text is the second-order speech act (Maclean, 1991: 274). They inform, persuade, advise, or indeed exhort and command the reader. Marie Maclean applies speech act theory to distinguish the text into first order and second order: the paratext involves a series of first-order illocutionary acts in which the author, the editor, or the prefacer frequently use direct performatives. The simplest readers, who are least interested in peripheral knowledge, can hardly be as imagined or declared, always possess the above-mentioned materials easily’ (Genette, 2000: 1). They provide a rich ecological environment and atmosphere for the text: ‘sometimes even an official or semi-official comment is provided. The paratext can be further defined as: titles, subtitles, intertitles, prefaces, epilogues, dedications, opening information, illustrations, inserts, and other attached verbal and non-verbal signs. For us, accordingly, the paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public. These accompanying productions, which vary in extent and appearance, constitute what I have called elsewhere the work’s paratext, in keeping with the sometimes ambiguous meaning of this prefix in French (I mentioned adjectives like ‘parafiscal’ or ‘paramilitary’). And although we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround it and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in the form (nowadays at least) of a book. But this text is rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations. Genette believes:Ī literary work consists, entirely or essentially, of a text, defined (very minimally) as a more or less long sequence of verbal statements that are more or less endowed with significance. ![]() Researchers explain the paratext based on the relationship between the paratext and the main text. A literary work is generally formed by the relations between main text and its paratext, the relation between main text and paratext is a kind of ‘transtextual relation’, 2 and the paratext is ‘the notes or added elements that surround the text’ (Genette, 1988: 63). ![]() Genette believes that there has never been and will never exist a text without a paratext. His three serial publications, The Architext: An Introduction (1979), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), and Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987), contain in-depth discussions on paratext and its relations with readers. The concept of paratext was cumulatively constructed by Jean Genette in his discussion of ‘cross-text relations’. 1.1 Paratext of Various Frame Factors of Wuxia 1 ![]()
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