ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how meaning is created multimodally by different book-cover designs and how adding social semiotic multimodal tools to the stylistics toolkit facilitates detailed, comprehensive and systematic analysis of their semiosis. It first presents analysis of seven graphic front covers of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), focusing on the multimodal meaning created by the different covers, the reader expectations they are consequently likely to prompt and the extent to which these expectations are fulfilled or frustrated by the verbal narrative. This is followed by analysis of seven photographic front covers of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). While also focusing on the multimodal semiosis of the covers, attention is here directed more to how recent front covers create meaning that relates to Kerouac’s narrative set some forty to fifty years earlier, to the author himself and to the coming into being of the novel. The chapter ends with a section on film tie-ins and bestseller emulations, centring on the semiotic impact of the market and marketing contexts on their cover design. Throughout, the chapter demonstrates how book covers may relate more or less illustratively to the contents of the novels and at the same time also signal ‘author’, ‘publisher’, ‘book series’, ‘intended reader’, ‘marketing context’, ‘genre’ and ‘cover designer’.
