Visual Mediation Across Publishing Contexts: A Comparative Multimodal Analysis of the Book Covers of Water

Abstract

The study analyses the publishing contexts of two book cover designs of the novel Water, written by Bapsi Sidhwa. The book covers are published by Milkweed Editions in USA and by Readings in Pakistan. The book covers act as paratexts that a reader comes in contact with before engaging with the text itself and they become particularly significant in transnational literary circulation and in the representation of South Asian women’s socio-cultural experiences. The study uses a qualitative comparative methodology which is rooted in multimodal discourse analysis and social semiotics by applying Kress and Leeuwen’s visual grammar to examine representational, interactive, and compositional meanings of two covers. The findings show that western cover edition emphasizes abstraction and thematic universality, whereas the local edition foregrounds embodied experience and social specificity, and it makes gendered narratives varying across the transnational publishing contexts.