The last few years have witnessed a growing interest in items, verbal and visual, that constitute the ‘front-matter’ in a book. Genette (1987) included such elements into his notion of paratext and made a further distinction into ‘peritexts’ and ‘epitexts’, depending on whether the item is found within the book or outside it. His work demonstrates how paratexts (the term employed here), including titles, subtitles, title pages, prefaces, dedications, epilogues, notes, and the like, constitute functionally a highly complex process of mediation between the book, author, publisher and reader. The historical dimension of modern paratextual devices, though not part of Genette’s analysis, has since emerged as a productive, multidisciplinary field of study, bordering, most notably, on book history and the emergence of associated discourse practices (see e.g. Wogan-Brown et al., eds. 1990, Pahta and Jucker, eds. 2011, Smith and Wilson, eds. 2011,Litzler 2011, Suhr 2011).
Among the different paratextual devices, the prologue – and epilogue as its variant – constitutes a pivotal element, as borne out by its long history dating back to antiquity. The typology of prologues includes texts by author, printer, publisher and translator, among others, each providing a personal point of view into the work at hand and often combined with certain generic elements having to do with e.g. the origin of the work, appreciation of its merits, and the context of its production. In early books, prologues are often coupled with a dedication inscribing the work to a particular person in the capacity of patron or sponsor. The prologue apparatus thus provides an interactive framework for engaging prospective readers with a variety of strategies having to do with content of the book, such as informing, evaluating, persuading, and promoting.
The emphasis in the present discussion will be on prologues by translators of books from other languages into English in the medieval and early modern periods (cf. Ellis 2008). The communicative acts encoded in these intrinsically dialogic texts will be examined by applying a pragmatic approach to the material, with a special reference to speech acts and various rhetorical and formulaic patterns in the articulation of some of the salient, recurrent generic features of prologue discourse, such as concerns about the adequacy of the method of translation applied and the role of the English language as a medium of communication (cf. Ellis and Oakley-Brown, eds. 2001, Jucker and Taavitsainen, eds. 2009). The transition from medieval manuscript culture into that of printed texts in the sixteenth century is a particularly interesting phase in the development due to changes in the production of texts and concomitant changes in the attitude towards the written language. The discussion will be based on materials from the Helsinki Corpus, a corpus of Caxton’s prologues and a sampling of sixteenth-century prologues derived from the Early English Books Online database.
Ellis, Roger, ed. 2008. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Vol. I: To 1550. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, Roger and Liz Oakley-Brown, eds. 2001. Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Genette, Gérard 1987. Seuils. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Jucker, Andreas and Irma Taavitsainen, eds. 2009. Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam/
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Litzler, Mary Frances 2011. A Corpus of Middle English Medical Prologues in the Sloane Collection of The British Library: An Introduction to the Genre in Prose. Universidad de las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Pahta, Päivi and Andreas Jucker, eds. 2011. Communicating Early English Manuscripts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Helen and Louise Wilson, eds. 2011. Renaissance Paratexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suhr, Carla 2011. Publishing for the Masses: Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, Ruth Evans, eds. 1999. The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.