What Is an Epigraph? The Quotation Standing at the Door of a Book

The device operates before the reader has any of the text to go on, which gives it a specific kind of influence. It establishes register, so a line from a religious text, a pop lyric or a technical manual each prepare a different reading. It claims affiliation, placing the book in a tradition and inviting comparison with the author quoted, which is a claim about seriousness as much as about subject. It introduces a theme in compressed form, frequently one the book will complicate rather than confirm. It can supply an authority the author does not have, or undercut authority by quoting something absurd. And it establishes a contract about how literally to take what follows, which is why novels that are going to play games with truth so often open with a quotation about lying or storytelling. Because it is short, unattributed to the author and set apart, it carries a weight disproportionate to its length, and readers generally accept it without the scrutiny they apply to the text itself.

It belongs to a family of framing elements that scholars group together as the threshold of a book:

• •The dedication, addressed to a person and historically to a patron, which is about obligation rather than meaning
• •The preface or foreword, which explains the book, sometimes by the author and sometimes by somebody lending credibility
• •The blurb and cover copy, written to sell rather than to explain, and rarely by the author
• •The title and subtitle, which frequently carry more argument than any other few words in the volume
• •The colophon, a note on production, typeface or printing, which is the counterpart at the end
• •The whole category, which the critic Gerard Genette named paratext and analysed as material that shapes reading while sitting outside the work proper

Practice varies and several distinct approaches recur. A straightforward thematic epigraph states the book's concern in borrowed words. An ironic one sets up an expectation the text will violate, which can only be recognised in retrospect. A chapter-by-chapter series, common in nineteenth-century novels and in genre fiction, builds a secondary commentary running alongside the narrative. Invented epigraphs attributed to fictional sources are a standard device in speculative fiction, constructing a world by quoting its documents, and they also appear as jokes and hoaxes in literary fiction. Epigraphs drawn from within the book's own fictional world blur the frame deliberately. And occasionally an author quotes a critic, a review or an insult, which is a gesture with an obvious function. Editors and publishers also have views, since permissions must be cleared for copyrighted quotations and the cost and difficulty of that has quietly shaped which sources appear, favouring older material that has passed out of copyright.

Quoting an authority at the head of a text is much older than the printed book, since medieval manuscripts opened with scriptural or patristic citations that established the framework for what followed, and classical rhetoric treated the citation of authorities as a standard move. The modern literary form took shape alongside the novel, as printing conventions settled and title pages, prefaces and dedications acquired fixed positions, and it became conspicuous in the Gothic and Romantic periods where an epigraph from an older poet claimed a tradition for a new and disreputable genre. Nineteenth-century novels frequently carried one at the head of every chapter, and several authors wrote their own while attributing them to invented sources, a practice that has never quite stopped. Academic writing uses the device differently, where an epigraph frequently states the position the paper will argue against. Scientific papers largely abandoned it, and the occasional survival is treated as a mild eccentricity, which is itself a comment on how disciplines regard the framing of their own work.

Several difficulties recur. Misattribution is rampant, since epigraphs are frequently taken from quotation collections rather than from sources, and a substantial number of widely printed quotations attributed to famous figures are not traceable to them at all, with several well-documented cases circulating for decades in respectable books. Decontextualisation is a related issue, since a line extracted from an argument may mean something quite different in place, and epigraphs are almost never given enough context to check. Translation choices matter and are rarely acknowledged. There is also a persistent question of whether the device is doing work or performing erudition, and plenty of criticism has been directed at epigraphs that signal reading rather than illuminating anything. The practical test suggested by editors is whether the book reads differently without it, and if the answer is no, it belongs in a notebook rather than at the front of a book.

A quotation placed before the first line shapes the reading before the reader has any text to judge by, setting register, claiming a tradition and establishing how literally to take what follows. It belongs with dedications, prefaces and cover copy in the material that frames a work without being part of it. Misattribution is rampant because these are taken from quotation collections rather than sources.