Introduction: Unwrapping the French paratext

As an introduction to an edited volume, this essay is a liminal space between the essays that constitute the collection entitled Masking Strategies: Unwrapping the French Paratext and you, the readers who are preparing to engage with them. Of course, the nature of this liminal space is to be both inside this collection and outside it; it packages the essays, effectively sells them to readers, enabling them to approach the collected texts through one, but not the only, paradigm. Thus, it is the readers' 'discovery' of the volume through the paratext that determines its meanings. This liminal essay represents, however, our responsibility as authors to produce a reading context for a new and productive exchange, between a here and a there constituted on either side of the paratextual portal, and an us and a them.¹ As an essay, the current text has a double function: it both resembles the essays that follow and, at the same time, introduces them, thereby becoming pulled into the paratextual apparatus. Indeed, the other texts, for the most part, do not speak to each other but directly to the readers, whereas this text speaks to them as a collection. It speaks to them and, at the same time, it enables them to speak (as a whole, with some degree of collective authority) to readers. So, as we speak to the essays, we contributors also speak rather differently here to them, or you, than we do when we divide into our respective individualities inside the body of the text(s) proper. It is this difference that is the realm of the paratext. And it is the study of this paratextual difference, of this differentiating space between text, author and reader, which we wish to interrogate here (and there) in this text (and in the texts that follow).