Talk:Prologue

Comments

I have no idea what "appeared from a machine" means in this context. If it means something in a literary context it should surely link to an explanation for the lay person - i'm thinking "deus ex machina"? or something...

"The Greeks use a word ???, which included the modern meaning of the prologue, but was of wider significance, embracing any kind of preface, like the Latin praefatio." What are the ??? supposed to mean? Is the greek writing missing? or do you not know the word ? In the latter case: what about de:Prolegomena, which seems to mean "say beforehand", which in turn would match the meaning of preafatio/preface ? MartinBiely 14:55, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

I deleted this sentence for now. It's from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, so a printed version will have the correct Greek, but none of the online copies do because they're OCR scanned and the scanner doesn't read Greek. If somebody can get ahold of a paper copy and knows how to type Greek, then we can get the actual Greek... - furrykef (Talk at me) 17:06, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

A friend figured it out from the OCR text. It turns out the word is prologos, which we already have transcribed, so I'm just rewriting it to fit this new context. - furrykef (Talk at me) 17:12, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Dues Ex Machina means "God out of the machine". I believe Ex machina would be "out of the machine".

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This article is poorly written. I didn't bother reading the whole thing because several of the sentences in the first few paragraphs make no sense at all. Brightplace (talk) 14:38, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Cleanup Tag

While I recognise this content originated from an encyclopaedia, to read, it seems to jump around between an 'essay-esque' tone and the more usual 'formal' tone. I suspect this incongruity reflects that some parts of the text are still as written in the original 1911 edition, while other parts are new. Additionally, the most recent sustained work on this article was about 18 months ago; the majority of edits since that time have been link, category and spelling/grammar/character adjustments, interspersed with vandalism (and subsequent reversions). There are also no indications that this editing pattern will change in the near future.

Using the above as the rationale, I've now added a cleanup tag to the main article page. I can't work further on the article right now, but have noted it on my page to work on further as time permits. — digitaleon • talk @ 15:11, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Book Design template

This page is about prologues in general, including Drama (whereas another user had argued in the edit history that it's only about the Drama ones). Thus, I'd argue that the Book Design template belongs here, so I added it. Though there's little information here about non-drama prologues, the answer is not to remove things, but for someone capable to add information about non-drama prologues. If a separate page is really needed for Drama Prologues (I don't think so, but don't mind if there is), feel free to take them to Prologue (drama).

Thanks,

-- TimNelson (talk) 11:49, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Voice of a character?

The article says In a book, the prologue is a part of the Front matter which is in the voice of a character in the book, rather than in the voice of the author.

Why is this the case? Don't some fiction authors set the scene or provide information in ordinary narrative, rather than the voice of a character? --DThomsen8 (talk) 01:05, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

ISBN Citations

Should i fix the sitations to include ISBN Numbers or shall these be left as is right now, Thanks Hybirdd (talk) 09:25, 5 September 2012 (UTC)