First and Last Words: Paratextual Guardianship and the Gendered Canonization of Frankenstein in Turkish Reception

Abstract

This article examines how a Turkish ‘classics’ edition can structure reception through peritextual design. Using the İletişim Klasikleri’s 2019 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a case study, it argues that this edition constructs an ‘authority architecture’: a sequenced threshold that allocates interpretive power, frames authorship, and produces canonicity. Methodologically, the article combines close reading with feminist critical discourse-analytic attention to voice allocation, epistemic stance (hedges, rumour markers, evaluative verdicts), and nomination/relational naming across the cover, author biography and chronology, Murat Belge’s preface, and Walter Scott’s afterword. The analysis shows that the cover’s authority line (with Belge’s preface and Scott’s afterword) installs male, allographic voices as the first and last interpretive anchors, borrowing prestige to authorize ‘proper’ reading as part of classics-series value. While the peritexts appear to canonize Shelley, they simultaneously constrain her authorial authority by scripting her life through romance-tragedy and certification frames and by managing attribution politics through calibrated uncertainty. From a feminist perspective, the edition does not activate the interpretive resources made available by its own starting configuration (a woman author, a woman translator, and a reception history shaped by gendered doubt). I conceptualize this pattern as paratextual guardianship and propose it as a portable analytic for tracking gendered canonization in classics publishing in Turkey and beyond.