Definition:
(1) A brief motto or quotation set at the beginning of a text (a book, a chapter of a book, an essay, a poem) to suggest its theme. Adjective: epigraphic.
(2) Words inscribed on a wall, a building, or the base of a statue.
See also: Commonly Confused Words: Epigram, Epigraph, and Epitaph.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "write on"Examples and Observations:
- No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
John Donne
(epigraph to For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, 1940) - Mistah Kurtz--he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy
(epigraphs to The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot, 1925) - The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.
"The Hippopotamus," T.S. Eliot
(epigraph to The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry, 1994) - Historia, ae, f. 1. inquiry, investigation, learning.
2. a) a narrative of past events, history. b) any kind of narrative: account, tale, story.
"Ours was the marsh country . . ."
Great Expectations
(epigraphs to Waterland by Graham Swift, 1983) - History begins only at the point where things go wrong; history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret.
Waterland
(epigraph to Evening Is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan, 2009) - Life imitates art.
Oscar Wilde
I would be a Papist if I could. I have fear
enough, but an obstinate rationality prevents me.
Dr. Johnson
(epigraphs to The British Museum Is Falling Down by David Lodge, 1965) - "The custom of using epigraphs becomes more widespread during the eighteenth century, when we find them (generally in Latin) at the head of some major works . . ..
"A somewhat late-developing custom, then, which more or less replaces the classical custom of using dedicatory epistles and which, in its beginnings, seems a little more typical of works of ideas than of poetry or the novel."
(Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997)
