Definitions

To a greater extent than perhaps any other paratextual element, the title raises problems of definition and requires careful analysis: the titular apparatus as we have known it since the Renaissance (I will discuss its prehistory below) is very often not so much precisely an element as a rather complex whole – and the complexity is not exactly due to length. Some very long titles of the classical period, such as the original title of Robinson Crusoe (which we will meet again), were relatively simple in status. A much shorter whole, such as Zadig ou La destinée, Histoire orientale [Voltaire's Zadig or Destiny, An Oriental Tale], forms a more complex statement, as we will see.

One of the founders of modern titology, Leo H. Hoek, writes very correctly that the title as we understand it today is actually (and this is true at least of ancient and classical titles) an artificial object, an artifact of reception or of commentary, that readers, the public, critics, booksellers, bibliographers, … and titologists (which all of us are, at least sometimes) have arbitrarily separated out from the graphic and possibly iconographic mass of a “title page” or a cover. This mass includes, or may include, many appended bits of information that the author, the publisher, and their public did not use to distinguish as clearly as we do now. After much of that was set aside – the names of the author, the dedicatee, and the publisher; the address of the publisher; the date of printing; and other introductory information – it gradually became customary to retain a more limited whole as the title.