Epigraph (literature)  

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"Ashbee's mania for quotation is not, however, exhausted by these devices. He will stick in a few lines wherever a small blank space occurs, and he is happy to manufacture the opportunity to quote at length and liberty: Volume II, the Centuria, for example, opens with no less than six full pages of epigraphs."--The Other Victorians (1964) by Steven Marcus, p. 53

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In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component. The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional context.

Contents

Examples

  • The epigraphs to the preamble of Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual (La Vie mode d'emploi) and to the book as a whole warn the reader that tricks are going to be played and that all will not be what it seems.
  • The epigraph to E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime quotes Scott Joplin's instructions to those who play his music, "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play Ragtime fast." This stands in contrast to the accelerating pace of American society at the turn of the 20th century.
  • The epigraph to Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is John 12:24. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
  • Stephen King uses many epigraphs in his writing, usually to mark the beginning of another section in the novel. An unusual example is The Stand where he uses lyrics from certain songs to express the metaphor used in a particular part.
  • A Samuel Johnson quote is used as an epigraph in Hunter S. Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ("He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man").

Fictional quotations

Some authors use fictional quotations that purport to be related to the fiction of the work itself. For example, Stephen King's The Dark Half has epigraphs taken from the fictitious novels written by the protagonist; Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair has quotations from supposedly future works about the action of the story; John Green's The Fault in Our Stars has a quotation from a fictitious novel, An Imperial Affliction, which features prominently as a part of the story. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby opens with a poem entitled "Then Wear the Gold Hat," purportedly written by Thomas Parke D'Invilliers. D'Invilliers is a character in Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise and it should also be noted that, aside from its role as a tie-in to the Fitzgerald canon, the poem elucidates one of the major themes of the work. This cliché is parodied by Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide To Fantasyland.

Dean Koontz' The Book of Counted Sorrows began as a fictional book of poetry from which Koontz would "quote" when no suitable existing option was available; Koontz simply wrote all these epigraphs himself. Many fans, rather than realizing the work was Koontz' own invention, apparently believed it was a real, but rare, volume; Koontz later collected the existing verse into an actual book.

Some science fiction works (Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and Frank Herbert's Dune series are examples) use quotations from an imagined future history of the period of their story. This can be seen as a way of constructing authenticity for a work of the imagination.

The film Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby opens with a fictional quotation from the real historical figure Eleanor Roosevelt, using the epigraph to comedic effect.

See also

Bibliography



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Epigraph (literature)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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