Epigraph (literature)
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In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document, monograph or section or chapter thereof.[1] The epigraph may serve as a preface to the work; as a summary; as a counter-example; or as a link from the work to a wider literary canon,[2] with the purpose of either inviting comparison or enlisting a conventional context.
Examples
- As the epigraph to The Sum of All Fears, Tom Clancy quotes Winston Churchill in the context of thermonuclear war: "Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum of their fears."
- Sir Walter Scott frequently used epigraphs in his historical novels, including throughout his Waverley novels.
- The long quotation from Dante's Inferno that prefaces T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is part of a speech by one of the damned in Dante's Hell.
- 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."
- The epigraph to Fyodor Dostoyevsky'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."
- The epigraph to Eliot's Gerontion is a quotation from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.
- Eliot's "The Hollow Men" uses the line "Mistah Kurtz, he dead" from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as one of its two epigraphs.
- As an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation."
- The epigraph to Theodore Herzl's Altneuland is "If you will it, it is no dream..." which became a slogan of the Zionist movement.
- Louis Antoine de Saint-Just's line "Nobody can rule guiltlessly" appears before chapter one in Arthur Koestler's 1940 anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon.
- A Samuel Johnson quotation serves 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."
- Stephen King uses many epigraphs in his writing, usually to mark the beginning of another section in a novel. An unusual example is The Stand wherein he uses lyrics from certain songs to express the metaphor used in a particular part.
- Jack London uses the first stanza of John Myers O'Hara's poem "Atavism" as the epigraph to The Call of the Wild.
- Cormac McCarthy opens his 1985 novel Blood Meridian with three epigraphs: quotations from French writer and philosopher Paul Valéry, from German Christian mystic and Gnostic Jacob Boehme, and a 1982 news clipping from the Yuma Sun reporting the claim of members of an Ethiopian archeological excavation that a fossilized skull three hundred millennia old seemed to have been scalped.
- 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.
- J. K. Rowling's novels frequently begin with epigraphs relating to the themes explored. For example, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows opens with two: a quotation from Aeschylus's tragedy The Libation Bearers and a quotation from William Penn.
- Quotation from Woodrow Wilson's The State on the title page of every issue of The Bohemian Review, a magazine endorsing independence of Czechs and Slovaks to Austria-Hungary in 1917–1918 (example).
A book may have an overall epigraph, part of the front matter, or one for each chapter.
See also
- Abstract (legal)
- Abstract (summary)
- Introduction
- Preamble
- Preface
- Foreword
- Prologue
- Afterword
- Conclusion
- Epigraph
- Epilogue
- Postface
- Postscript
External links
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