Postface: paratextuality, self-alterity and the becoming-text

The aim of this book has been, and is, to generate fresh ideas around the paratext both as a phenomenon and a concept. The individual chapters have, by and large, taken Genette's classification of paratextual elements as a starting point for examining different aspects of a text's relationship with its readers and/ or its publishers. By way of a postface, we wish to test the perversity of the paratext a little further, to stretch its limits and to challenge the accepted understanding of what can reasonably be understood by the paratext as compared to the text. In particular, we shall examine how the beginnings of certain books extend the paratext into the diegesis proper. In short, this concluding chapter will offer something of an exit via the incipit. And so to beginnings ...