Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts

In literary criticism, the notion of paratext refers to all kinds of verbal or visual information that surrounds the actual work (the “text”) and that helps describe and identify as well as explain and interpret it. As initially theorized by Gérard Genette, the paratext consists of two main groups: first the peritext, that is the set of paratextual elements that spatially accompany the work, such as for instance a title or a blurb; second the epitext, which accompanies the text in other ways, at a distance (in space, not necessarily in time), such as an author’s elevator pitch on a website or an interview with the publisher. Since Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997 [French original 1987]), the study of the paratext has become a typical feature of nearly any literary analysis, but as with so many other aspects and dimensions of literary and rhetorical analysis, the digital...