'What a weird word it is' : typographic meaning-making in Robert Nye's The Late Mr. Shakespeare from a multimodal perspective

What is it about?

This paper examines typography as a semiotic mode involved in multimodal creation of typographic meaning-making in Robert Nye’s The Late Mr. Shakespeare. The semiotic principles of symbol, index, icon, and discursive import are employed to describe typographic meaning-making in Nye’s novel. The distinctive typographic features of weight, connectivity and curvature, slanted regular, abnormal hyphens, division slash, the inconsistent use of majuscules and minuscules come to exemplify the effect of salience as a narrative technique in typographic meaning-making. In addition, the interaction of the modes in the given text displays visual similarities either in terms of typography and sound (for example, mocking accent, animal onomatopoeia), in terms of the typeface and handwriting, or between regular type text and the one in italics, thus giving a special prominence to a multimodal analysis of Nye’s The Late Mr. Shakespeare.

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Why is it important?

The present research applies the notions of the social semiotic theory of multimodality to discuss typographic meaning-making in Robert Nye’s The Late Mr. Shakespeare (1998) and analyze which of the semiotic resources participate in the multimodal meaning-potential of the novel.