‘As the title implies’: How readers talk about titles in Amazon book reviews

Most stylistic analyses of literary texts begin with the text proper, largely ignoring the paratextual elements that precede it. The extent of this lacuna within stylistics is so great that a search through the back catalogue of Language and Literature, stylistics’ flagship journal, returns no results for contributions whose titles contain the terms ‘title’ or ‘paratext’. In what follows we underline the implications of this neglect through findings which point to the import of titles for readers’ interpretive processes. Drawing on our analysis of a 58-million-word corpus of book reviews from the online retailer Amazon.com, the research reported on here provides evidence for what many theorists have claimed but for which they have often provided no empirical support, namely, that titles contribute to the establishment of reader expectations about a text.