Untitle‘What a Weird Word It Is’:Typographic Meaning-makingin Robert Nye’s The LateMr. Shakespeare froma Multimodal Perspectived Item

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