A Cognitive Poetic Approach to Paratext: Horace Walpole’s Prefaces to The Castle of Otranto. A Gothic Story

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Abstract

_{Based on an analysis of two Prefaces to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. A Gothic Story, the paper offers a cognitive poetics view of paratext, a literary device defined by Genette as “a threshold of interpretation”. Viewed as a symptom of the author’s presence “with-in” and “with-out” text, paratextual information is held to play an important role in text interpretation. It is claimed that a literary work’s interpretation is a result of the speaker/author – hearer/reader meaning negotiation which takes place in the Current Discourse Space (Langacker 2008) and involves intersubjectification, a cognitive process referred to by Langacker as “apprehension of other minds” (Langacker 2007).}