Painting the Medium: Difference between revisions

* At one point, ''[[Interworld]]'' has the bottom quarter of a page go completely black, to symbolize the main character losing his memories.

* The text for "The Mouse's Tale" in ''[[Alice in Wonderland]]'' winds down the page and narrows to a point, resembling a mouse's ''tail''.

* Similarly, Karen Hesse's novel ''The Music of Dolphins'' is told by a young girl who was [[Raised by Wolves]] (or dolphins, as the case may be). At the beginning, the text is quite large and written in very simple sentences; as the narrator learns more English, the font size decreases and the breadth of vocabulary increases. {{spoiler|She eventually has a breakdown and goes back to the ocean, forcing the text to return to its original simplified state.}}

* ''[[The Athenian Murders]]'' by José Carlos Somoza played with this similarly to ''[[House of Leaves]]'', with an apparent ancient Greek mystery being the bulk of the book and various footnotes telling other stories. One set of footnotes is by the original translator who was rumoured to have been murdered in the same fashion as the characters in the text, and another set of rare footnotes apparently by the editors of the copy you are actually reading. Most of the footnotes are from the current translator who is driving himself crazy, convinced that there is a hidden message in the translated text, and becomes convinced that the characters in the text are interacting with him. {{spoiler|Eventually, it's revealed that both translators are fictional characters, and the entire book and all its footnotes was written by someone else. (Who, to make matters more confusing, wrote himself as one of the minor characters in the Greek mystery, making the translators characters created by someone in the text that they are translating.)}}

* In the [[Real Life]] "[http://www.purplehell.com/riddletools/bacon.htm Baconian Cipher]" (not actually a cipher, rather, a steganographic code), developed by Francis Bacon, two different typefaces ('''bold''', ''italic'', {{smallcaps|a different font}}, {{color|blue|a}} {{color|red|different}} {{color|green|font}} {{color|blue|colour}}, etc.) are utilised, one standing for the letter "A" and one standing for B, so that messages can be hidden within the fabric of some plaintext, i.e. literature, be it fictional or not. It has, therefore, been suggested by some that Bacon in fact might have hidden clues to the supposed "fact" he wrote [[Shakespeare]]'s plays by using this ciphe-er, steganographic code.

* In ''[[The Years of Rice and Salt]]'' by Kim Stanley Robinson, the format of the book changes to match the historical era each section is set in. At the beginning, chapters have [[In Which a Trope Is Described|elaborate descriptions]] and the prose is frequently interrupted by poetry. Gradually, the prose becomes more solid, the chapters shorten to just titles, then numbers, and then nothing but a blank spot between them and the next chapter.

 

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