Absorption — The operation of folding a prologue’s material into Chapter One, or relocating it to its proper place in the main timeline, and deleting the label. The standard remedy for a unit that earns its existence but not its exteriority. §1.2, §7.0.
Accessus ad auctores — The medieval schoolroom’s standard prefatory apparatus, supplying an author, subject, intention, manner, order and utility before the text was read. The ancestor of the orientation functions now distributed between prologue, blurb and genre shelf. §3.4.
Advance mention (amorce), or seed — Genette’s term for an apparently insignificant detail whose significance becomes visible only in retrospect. The unit of fragmentary closure. §6.2, §6.6.
Advance notice (annonce) — Genette’s term for an explicit announcement of something to come. The unit of the choric or proleptic prologue, closed by arrival rather than by recognition. §6.2.
Authority domain — The chapter’s proposed sixth domain: the prologue that establishes how the book knows what it tells, and on whose authority — by provenance, an intermediary, an authority claim, or an acknowledged limit. §4.6.
Axes of distance — The four dimensions along which a prologue may be separated from the main narrative: time, place, viewpoint, register. One is normally load-bearing and the others incidental. §6.1.
Closing the distance — The point, or points, at which the main narrative catches up to, recontextualises, completes, or deliberately refuses to close what the prologue opened. Four modes: total closure, fragmentary closure, recontextualisation, deliberate non-closure. §6.5.
Cold open — A scene begun in motion with framing deferred. A gambit available to any chapter, frequently and wrongly labelled a prologue. §2.3.
Contextual frame — Emmott’s term for the reader’s running mental representation binding persons to a place and time. A prologue builds one and immediately suspends it. §3.9, §6.2.
Diegetic threshold — This chapter’s term for the prologue’s constitutive hybridity: typographically paratextual (labelled, set apart, skippable) and ontologically diegetic (part of the story). The boundary Genette’s system does not quite accommodate. §3.1.
Distance — How far a prologue sits from Chapter One, measured along the four axes. §6.1.
False advertising — The failure in which a prologue promises a more exciting, violent or mysterious book than the one that follows. The prologue’s version of Chapter 9’s borrowed hook and Chapter 16’s mismatched final note. §8.2.
Fragmentary closure — Closing a prologue’s distance in several small instalments across the book rather than in one late reveal, so that the dormant frame is periodically re-primed. §6.6.
Held note — A distance deliberately left open for the whole book, as a permanent condition rather than an unpaid debt. Distinguishable from negligence only by the book’s wider behaviour towards its own frames. §6.5.
Higher bar — The chapter’s first principle: a prologue must justify not merely existing but existing outside the main narrative. A unit failing the first test is cut; one failing only the second is absorbed. §1.2, §3.10.
Induction — A framing scene with characters of its own, watching or presenting the main action. Elizabethan and Jacobean in origin; the ancestor of the frame narrative. §2.4, §6.3.
Label test — The diagnostic of replacing “Prologue” with “Chapter One” and asking what changes. Its third and most interesting outcome is that something is gained. §7.1, test 3.
Last ordinary day — The proposed fourteenth prologue type: the routine immediately preceding a rupture the main narrative will investigate, in which nothing happens and the dread comes from the reader’s foreknowledge. It needs fragmentary closure, since it holds objects to be recognised and no event to be arrived at. §6.3, §9.9.
Paratext — Genette’s term for the apparatus surrounding a text — title, cover, epigraph, preface, note — that conditions its reception without belonging to the narrative. §3.1.
Positional claim — The assertion, implicit in every prologue, that this material could not have done its work from inside the main narrative. §1.2.
Preliminary exposition — Sternberg’s term for antecedents delivered up front, before the action. The prologue is its limit case. §3.7.
Primacy effect — The disproportionate influence of early information on the interpretation of later information. Asch (1946); Perry (1979). The reason false advertising is so costly. §3.9.
Privileged position — Rabinowitz’s term for textual locations readers automatically treat as significant. A prologue occupies one twice over, which is why an unredeemed prologue detail costs far more than an unredeemed detail on page 100. §3.9.
Prologos — In Aristotle’s Poetics, everything in a tragedy preceding the chorus’s entrance. A definition by position rather than by function, and the ancestor of the definition used here. §3.3.
Prologue — A unit of narrative set apart from the main story’s time, place, viewpoint or register, positioned before it begins, and labelled as apart, whose separation is itself doing work the main narrative’s opening pages could not do as well. §2.1.
Prologue-function — The set of jobs a prologue performs, which a book may discharge without using the label. Wuthering Heights and Their Eyes Were Watching God are the chapter’s two demonstrations. §9.2, §9.5.
Recontextualisation — A mode of closing in which the narrative never reaches the prologue but changes what it meant. §6.5.
Reinstatement cost — The attentional expense of recalling a dormant contextual frame, rising with the interval since it was last primed. The empirical form of “distance and closing”. §3.9, §6.2.
Relocation — Moving a prologue’s material to the point in the main timeline where it happened, as an ordinary scene, and deleting the label. With absorption, one of the two outcomes short of keeping a prologue separate. §2.1, §7.1, test 2.
Skip test — The diagnostic derived from Genette’s observation that the preface is a book’s most easily bypassed zone: what happens to a reader who skips this? The intended profile is nothing incomprehensible, and something lost. §7.1, test 8.
Suspense and curiosity — Sternberg’s distinction between uncertainty about the future and uncertainty about the past. A proleptic prologue trades the first for the second. §3.7, §8.6.
Total closure — The mode of closing in which the narrative reaches the prologue’s moment and completes its frame. §6.5.