Peritexts in the 21st Century. The guardians of literary discourse for children’s books

Abstract

The present research starts from the following intuition: illustration in endpapers in children’s literature is achieving a relevant role as a narratological strategy that joins the discourse. Nowadays, we can find plain endpapers in lots of illustrated books and picture books, whose only function seems to be that of joining the book to the cover, but there is also another type of endpapers: the illustrated ones and with an innovative function that is to be part of the story. Therefore, they are (in some picturebooks and, surprisingly, also in some illustrated books) basic elements in order that the reader can infer meanings and update the text. Our objectives were quite clear: we were going to analyze these endpapers, redefine and categorize them. At the same time, there was a new reader in sight: a reader considered as “textual strategy” in a publishing landscape that took into account all these changes and took part of this revolution in the concept of book as an object.