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what grounds the place and time ‘which speaks’ might be larger than or otherwise different from the place and time which ‘is spoken.’ 4 At no point in his discussion does Weimann deploy the vocabulary of ‘trafficking’ or ‘intertextuality’, although from the very outset he is preoccupied with the ‘interaction of diverse modes of playing’, whose intricacies commingle ‘with the representation of character’. 5 What drives Weimann’s complex argument is the distinction between ‘literacy
Stories , recalls, in some tangential respects, the description of textuality and intertextuality provided by Roland Barthes in his much quoted account of ‘The Death of the Author’. 2 For Barthes too, ‘a text is … a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’. 3 There are, however, several crucial differences between Rushdie’s conception of the sea of stories and Barthes’s vision of intertextual flux. For
‘Why would a textual mother haunt a house like this?’ recalls Atwood’s allusion to ‘secret plots’ of women’s gothic ( 1977 ); and the metaphor of the house of fiction: feminine gothics are haunted houses, not only in the contextual sense of ‘experience’ but also in the intertextual sense of continuation and deconstruction of feminine textuality. In this sense, Barbara Godard
earlier Elizabethan Troy-stories along the way. In this chapter, I will show that Oenone and Paris merits new attention, not only because it appears to be one of Heywood’s earliest experimentations with an Ovidian source text, but also because it moves beyond this source in a variety of intriguing ways, demonstrating the complex and inventive intertextuality, and the interest in readers and reception, which would come to characterise Heywood’s more ambitious later classicism. In his choice of protagonists, T. H. attempts to write himself into a well
1 Intertextuality and allegory in Virgil’s Eclogues Servius and political allegory Virgil’s chief innovation in pastoral, it has long been recognized, is his introduction of contemporary political realities. Theocritus’ Idylls are varied in subject matter, sometimes set in a bustling city, sometimes speaking of or addressing contemporary rulers, sometimes miniaturizing heroic epic, but the group of idylls recognized in antiquity as ‘bucolic songs’ deal with herdsmen concerned mainly with singing and with love, in a world apparently sealed off from the events of
external audiences. For Anna Harrison, Mechthild's book, as a collaborative venture between an, at first, reluctant Mechthild and at least two other nuns at Helfta, reflects what she terms ‘a protracted tangle of talk’ between the women and the sources that went into its production. 48 Such a ‘tangle of talk’ – what Laura Grimes has termed a ‘conversational theology’, and another version, perhaps, of Hope Emily Allen's ‘flotsam and jetsam’ – probably best reflects the way in which Margery's intertextual materials
Lorenzo‘s dream, at the beginning of Lewis‘s The Monk (1796), is closely based on Lovelace‘s dream, near the end of Richardson‘s Clarissa (1747-48); the realization of Lorenzo‘s dream, in the rape and murder of Antonia at the end of Lewis‘s novel, is based closely on Clarissa‘s dream, near the beginning of Richardson‘s. Lewis consistently (in the terms Gérard Genette uses in Palimpsests) devalues Lovelace‘s dream and revalues Clarissa‘s, achieving a transvaluation of Richardson‘s novel. He also literalizes many of Richardson‘s metaphors, a process which, as Tzvetan Todorov argues in The Fantastic, is essential to the fantastic, and which as Margaret Homans argues in Bearing the Word, enables the articulation of womens experiences. As a result, The Monk, despite its conflicted sexual politics, does contribute to the feminization of fiction that was part of the historical project of the Gothic.
Charles Maturin‘s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is often considered the last major work in the corpus of Romantic-period Gothic. This paper draws upon that text and Maturin‘s correspondence, especially his sermons, in which the author incarnates a rich matrix of dichotomies, to offer a reading of the subtle metatextual and autobiographical qualities of the novel. Maturin‘s conflicted identity as clergyman and literary parvenu afford understanding of the nature of, and challenges posed by, this complex work. Like Maturin‘s preaching, Melmoth bears witness to and sympathy with its time. Yet it also bears the imprints or multiple scripts of historical and psychological forces contributing to its formation. Ostensibly a Gothic romance engaged with the dialectic of high Romanticism, it is shown to be a self-reflexive text, with ambivalence towards its own literary form. The plethora of tales within Maturin‘s novel represent an attempt to convey and self-validate a fabric of a created national history, but Melmoth is shown to both use and indict the ideological structures that it has employed to create its own texture. It is suggested that detail of torture and anatomisation of belief represent an unconscious self-dramatisation.
This article analyses two recent American rewritings of the Leviathan myth: Dan Simmons‘s The Terror (2007) and Tim Curran‘s Leviathan (2013). Belonging to a tradition that has fruitfully elaborated the sea monster paradigm, both novels respond to current concerns about the spiritual and ethical decline of Western culture, the perils of anarchy, the monetarization of relations, and the impending ecological disasters. Besides exploring the biblical and Hobbesian intertextuality of the two novels, the article investigates various meanings coalescing into the scary creatures represented by Simmons and Curran. Two other objects of scrutiny are the increasing spectacularization of horror in todays literature and the potentiality of nautical Gothic, a form of writing that connotes the sea as a perturbing generator of psychoontological distress.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of the postcolonial Gothic through a focus on Black Australian literature (Plains of Promise by Alexis Wright and Mudrooroo‘s tetralogy, Master of the Ghost Dreaming, The Undying, Underground and The Promised Land). This paper focuses on the process of repossession of the European Gothic intertext and in particular canonical texts like Stoker‘s Dracula, which allows Mudrooroo to revive the subversive potential of the Gothic genre and use it to debunk the colonial discourse. It analyses the workings of the postcolonial Gothic and shows that instead of producing hybrid monsters through intertextual replays, Mudrooroo‘s and Alexis Wright‘s texts seem almost naturally Gothic, as if there was a certain Gothicism inherent in the postcolonial experience.