Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: What's an epigraph in writing?
In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component.[1] The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon,[2] either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional context.[3]
Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot. He introduces this notion of intention in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac's story "Sarrasine" in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls in love with him. When, in the passage, the character dotes over his perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what. "Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? … We can never know." Writing, "the destruction of every voice," defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective. (Barthes returned to "Sarrasine" in his book "S/Z", where he gave the story a rigorous close reading.)
In his discussion of science and religion in the novel, John Glendening notes that both character commentary on Darwin's publications along with the epigraphs mentioning those works as direct contributor's to the novels emphasis on science superseding religion. Similarly, by quoting Marx with the first epigraph, along with multiple subsequent epigraphs, the novel directs thematic attention towards the socio-economics issues within the novel. Deborah Bowen describes literary critics struggling to find readings of the epigraphs that explore the themes of the novel, and argues that the poor relationship between the epigraphs and the text "disperses the authority of the narrative voice, thus destroying his power to speak as a moralist." For Bowen, the epigraphs support the satire of Victorian fiction conventions in the novel.
Epigraphy (, "inscription") is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the writing and the writers. Specifically excluded from epigraphy are the historical significance of an epigraph as a document and the artistic value of a literary composition.
Cursive Nabataean writing changed into Arabic writing, likeliest between the dates of the an-Namāra inscription and the Jabal Ramm inscription. Most writing would have been on perishable materials, such as papyrus. As it was cursive, it was liable to change. The epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be pre-Islamic.
Gallant was candid about her desire for autonomy and privacy. In an interview with Geoff Hancock in "Canadian Fiction" magazine in 1978, she discussed her "life project" and her deliberate move to France to write by saying, "I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It's what I like doing." In the preface to her collection "Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories" (1981), she used the words of Boris Pasternak as her epigraph: "Only personal independence matters."
Allan Stein is a 1999 novel by Matthew Stadler. Its epigraph is a quotation from writer Gertrude Stein: ""What is the use of being a boy if you grow up to become a man, what is the use?""
Early Christian inscriptions are the epigraphical remains of early Christianity. They are a valuable source of information in addition to the writings of the Church Fathers regarding the development of Christian thought and life in the first six centuries of the religion's existence. The three main types are sepulchral inscriptions, epigraphic records, and inscriptions concerning private life.
The Canadian Centre for Epigraphic Documents (CCED) is a non-profit organization founded in order to archive, catalog, and digitize epigraphic materials. The CCED is staffed by professionals and graduate student volunteers from the information field: librarians, archivists, and digital humanists. 
The Narrows is a horror novel by American writer Ronald Malfi. It was published in 2012 by Darkfuse Publications in a limited edition hardcover for collectors, then as a trade paperback and ebook with Samhain Publishing. In an interview, Malfi suggests the idea for the novel came from his interest in attempting to write a vampire novel that had no vampires in it: "I thought, What if I could write a vampire novel without vampires? What type of creature could take their place--a creature that, throughout history, may have given birth to the vampire legend? And that opened up the door to all these thoughts." The book contains three epigraphs from Bram Stoker's novel " Dracula".
The strict epigraph is the epigraph with the graph itself removed:
Simon Martin is a British epigrapher, historian, writer and Mayanist scholar. He is best known for his contributions to the study and decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilisation of Mesoamerica. As one of the leading epigraphers active in contemporary Mayanist research, Martin has specialised in the study of the political interactions and dynastic histories of Classic-era Maya polities. A former honorary research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, Martin holds a position at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where he is an Associate Curator and Keeper in the American Section and is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jack London uses the first stanza of John Myers O'Hara's poem "Atavism" as the epigraph to The Call of the Wild. The epigraphs to the preamble of Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual (La Vie mode d'emploi) and to the book as a whole warn the reader that tricks are going to be played and that all will not be what it seems.
The following quotes and excerpts of Fenring's writings are referenced via epigraphs in the "Prelude to Dune" novels:
A function is convex if and only if its epigraph is a convex set. The epigraph of a real affine function "g" : R→R is a halfspace in R.
Initially known as Pho Khun Bang Klang Hao () interpreted as "Lord Who Rules Sky", the controversy surrounding this names illustrates the limitations of epigraphy. This science studies inscriptions or epigraphs as writing, to identify graphemes, clarify their meanings, classify their uses according to dates and cultural contexts. Texts inscribed on steles are often missing the top or bottom portions, just where one would expect dates, complicating the drawing of conclusions about the writing and the writers. Specifically excluded from epigraphy are the historical significance of an epigraph as a document, and the artistic value of a literary composition. These complications led to the ruler in early life being simply Hao (หาว).
The epigrapher David Stuart writes about the differences in content between the monumental hieroglyphical texts of Yaxchilan and those of Copan: 
Excerpts from Norma's writings appear as epigraphs in the "Legends of Dune" novels:
For Powers, the epigraph has come to stand for: "the lack of control soldiers have over what happens to them. The war proceeds, no matter what you think or do; it's an entity unto itself. You're powerless, and powerlessness itself becomes the enemy. That was my emotional experience of the war. The idea of the bird resonated with the core of what I was trying to get at."
As the epigraph to The Sum of All Fears, Tom Clancy[4] quotes Winston Churchill in the context of thermonuclear war:Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum of their fears. The long quotation from Dante's Inferno that prefaces T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is part of a speech by one of the damned in Dante's Hell. Linking it to the monologue which forms Eliot's poem adds a comment and a dimension to Prufrock's confession. * The epigraph to E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime quotes Scott Joplin's instructions to those who play his music, "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast." The epigraph to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is John 12:24. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The epigraph to Eliot's Gerontion is a quotation from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" uses the line "Mistah Kurtz, he dead" from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as one of its two epigraphs. As an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation." The epigraph to Theodore Herzl's 'Altneuland' is "If you will it, it is no dream..." which became a slogan of the Zionist movement. A Samuel Johnson quote is used as an epigraph in Hunter S. Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Stephen King uses many epigraphs in his writing, usually to mark the beginning of another section in a novel. An unusual example is The Stand wherein he uses lyrics from certain songs to express the metaphor used in a particular part.
One of three epigraphs in Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian is from Valéry's Writing at the Yalu River (1895):
Galina Gavrilovna Yershova, or Ershova (; born 17 March 1955) is a prominent Russian academic historian, linguist, and epigrapher, who specialises in the study of the ancient civilisations, cultures, and languages of the New World. As an Americanist scholar, her area of expertise is in the field of Mesoamerican studies, and in particular that of the pre-Columbian Maya civilisation, its historical literature, and its writing system. Yershova is a former student and protégé of the famed Russian linguist and epigrapher Yuri Knorozov, renowned for his central contributions towards the decipherment of the Maya script.
In "Count Fenring: A Profile" (referenced via epigraph in "Dune"), Princess Irulan writes of Fenring's relationship with her father, Shaddam IV:
Traditionally, Pre-Columbian Aztec writing has not been considered a true writing system, since it did not represent the full vocabulary of a spoken language in the way that the writing systems of the Old World or the Maya Script did. Therefore, generally Aztec writing was not meant to be read, but to be told. The elaborate codices were essentially pictographic aids for memorizing texts, which include genealogies, astronomical information, and tribute lists. Three kinds of signs were used in the system: pictures used as mnemonics (which do not represent particular words), logograms which represent whole words (instead of phonemes or syllables), and logograms used only for their sound values (i.e. used according to the rebus principle). However, epigrapher Alfonso Lacadena has argued that by the eve of the Spanish invasion, one school of Nahua scribes, those of Tetzcoco, had developed a fully syllabic script which could represent spoken language phonetically in the same way that the Maya script did. Some other epigraphers have questioned the claim, arguing that although the syllabicity was clearly extant in some early colonial manuscripts (hardly any pre-Columbian manuscripts have survived), this could be interpreted as a local innovation inspired by Spanish literacy rather than a continuation of a pre-Columbian practice.
Writing in Sanskrit (Epigraphical Hybrid Sanskrit, EHS) appears in the first to fourth centuries CE.