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Progressive Intertextual Practice
in Modern and Contemporary
Literature

This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to

recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed
in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of
authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes,
Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to
include intersectionality specifically, broadly understood to include
gendered, racial and other forms of social justice including disability, and
the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts.
This diverse volume includes discussions of major canonical works such
as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the recent contemporary literature by
authors such as Siri Husvedt and Maggie O’Farrell, as well as theoretical
interventions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can
facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, as
the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission
is addressed. The choice of intertexts become deliberately political, ethical
and artistic signifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our
contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual
impairment to Shakespearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture
on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles.

Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University

of Sheffield.

Christin M. Mulligan is Adjunct Professor at Saint Joseph’s University.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

63 Posthumanity in the Anthropocene

Margaret Atwood’s Dystopias
Esther Muñoz‑González

64 The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels

Eva‑Maria Windberger

65 Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in Historical Crime Fiction

‘What’s One More Murder?’
Anthony Lake

66 Modern and Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry

Cultural Identities, Political Crises
Kyra Piperides

67 Temporalities in/of Crises in Anglophone Literatures

Edited by Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann

68 Stephen King and the Uncanny Imaginary

Erin Mercer

69 Postmodern Reading of Contemporary East African Fiction

Modernist Dream and the Demise of Culture
Andrew Nyongesa

70 Progressive Intertextual Practice in Modern and Contemporary

Literature
Edited by Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge‑

Studies‑in‑Contemporary‑Literature/book‑series/RSCL
Progressive Intertextual Practice
in Modern and Contemporary
Literature

Edited by
Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Katherine Ebury and Christin M.
Mulligan; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
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Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data
Names: Ebury, Katherine, 1986– editor. | Mulligan, Christin M., editor.
Title: Progressive intertextual practice in modern and contemporary
literature / edited by Katherine Ebury and Christin Mulligan.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. |
Series: Routledge studies in contemporary literature | Includes bibliographical
references and index.|
Identifiers: LCCN 2023055505 | ISBN 9781032578248 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781032578279 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003441199 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Intertextuality. | Literature, Modern—History and
criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays.
Classification: LCC PN98.I58 P74 2024 | DDC 809/.03—dc23/eng/20240108
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023055505
ISBN: 9781032578248 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032578279 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003441199 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003441199
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by codeMantra
Contents

List of Contributors vii

Acknowledgementsxi

Introduction 1
KATHERINE EBURY AND CHRISTIN M. MULLIGAN

PART I
New Metaphors for Progressive Intertextuality21

1 Authorship, the “Mezzanine”, and the Intercession of

Meaning: A Metaphysics of the Creative Writing Process 23
PHILIP MILES

2 De‑disciplining Criticism: Refiguring Reading as a Mode

of Response‑ability 47
RUTH DALY

PART II
Progressive Intertextuality and Inclusivity69

3 The Blind as Seen Through Blind Eyes: An Intertextual

Approach to Visual Impairment in James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922) 71
CLEO HANAWAY‑OAKLEY
vi Contents

4 Grotesque Mat(t)er: Materiality and Matrilineality in

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) 90
ORLAGH WOODS

PART III
Progressive Intertextuality and Interdisciplinarity113

5 “Yardbird Suite”: Jazz, Double Consciousness, and the

Reverberations of the Harlem Renaissance in Stewart
Parker’s Pentecost (1987) 115
MATTHEW FOGARTY

6 Novel Art: The Contemporary Turn towards Ekphrasis 134

MONIKA GEHLAWAT

Coda: Questions of the Tongue 154

CHRISTIN M. MULLIGAN

Index157
Contributors

Ruth Daly is Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Global Creative Industries at

the University of Leeds. Working closely with feminist interventions in
psychoanalytic theory, feminist literary criticism, and affect theory, her
research examines ethical practices of reading in the humanities. More
broadly, her research interests include critical and cultural theory, post‑
colonial studies, decolonial theory, and visual culture. Her writing has
appeared in Australian Feminist Studies, Images: Journal of Visual and
Cultural Studies, symplokē, Leeds African Studies Bulletin, and New
Irish Writing. Reading Otherwise: Decolonial Feminisms (with Maya
Caspari) will be published by parallax in 2023.
Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University
of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of Modernism and Cosmology: Ab‑
surd Lights (2014) and of Modern Literature and the Death Penalty,
1890–1950 (2021) and the co‑editor of Joyce’s Nonfiction Writing:
Outside His Jurisfiction (with James Fraser, 2018) and Ethical Cross‑
roads in Literary Modernism (with Matt Fogarty and Bridget English,
forthcoming with Clemson UP in 2023). She has written articles and
chapters on topics including modernism, science and technology, repre‑
sentations of law and justice, and animal studies.
Matthew Fogarty is the author of Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats,
Joyce, and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations (Liverpool UP, 2023).
He has published articles in the Irish Gothic Journal, International
Yeats Studies, Modern Drama, the James Joyce Quarterly, and the Jour‑
nal of Academic Writing. He is the co‑editor (with Katherine Ebury and
Bridget English) of Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism (Clemson
UP, 2023). His current book project, Identity Politics and the Jazz Aes‑
thetic: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in Modern Transatlantic Literature,
explores how white writers from Britain and Ireland have used and
abused the jazz aesthetic to address formative sociopolitical develop‑
ments and complex ethical concerns.
viii Contributors

Monika Gehlawat is Associate Director of the School of Humanities and

Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi where she
teaches courses on contemporary and world literature, critical theory,
and visual art. Her book In Defense of Dialogue (Routledge 2020) con‑
siders Frank O’Hara, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, and Andy Warhol
alongside Habermas’ theory of communicative action. She has pub‑
lished essays in Post 45: Peer‑Reviewed, The James Baldwin Review,
Contemporary Literature, Literary Imagination, and Word & Image.
She also serves as Critic for the Center for Writers and Series Editor for
Literary Conversations.
Cleo Hanaway‑Oakley is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the Uni‑
versity of Bristol. Her research focuses on embodiment and the senses in
modernist literature and culture. She is the author of James Joyce and
the Phenomenology of Film (OUP, 2017) and is currently co‑editing,
with Keith Williams, The Edinburgh Companion to James Joyce and
the Arts (forthcoming with EUP, in 2024). She served on the executive
committee of the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) and
was the co‑editor of Modernist Cultures (2019–2023). She is a trustee
of the International James Joyce Foundation, an associate research fel‑
low at the Science Museum London, and a member of the management
committee for the University of Bristol’s Centre for Health, Humanities
and Science.
Philip Miles is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and English Literature at the
University of Bedfordshire, UK. The author of Midlife Creativity and
Identity: Life into Art (2019), his research emphasises how culture is
experienced and understood by individuals and groups in society via
narratives of personal value, emotion, variables of geography, and in‑
trinsic sociality and how these criteria may be utilised and maintained in
meaningful ways in contemporary life. He retains specific interests in the
sociology of literature (including reception studies, life writing, and soci‑
ological late modernism); the study of creativity (philosophy, processes,
and spaces); ethnographic methods; and sociological and literary theory.
Christin M. Mulligan is Lecturer at St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia.
She is the author of Geofeminism in Irish and Diasporic Culture: Inti‑
mate Cartographies (2019) and is working on a manuscript on romance
and diaspora. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gender Jus‑
tice and the Law, Literature Interpretation Theory, Flann O’Brien and
the Nonhuman, and Hypermedia Joyce Studies.
Orlagh Woods has recently completed her PhD in English Literature at May‑
nooth University. Her dissertation explores representations of moth‑
erhood across a range of 21st‑century adaptations of Shakespeare by
 Contributors ix

prominent female authors including Anne Enright, Jeanette Winterson,

and Preti Taneja. While her current work focuses specifically on liter‑
ary adaptation, her wider research interests include stage performance
and cinematic adaptation as well as women’s life writing. She has
written chapters on topics including representations of voluntary non‑
motherhood in contemporary India and the Emma Rice controversy at
the Globe in 2016.
Acknowledgements

This project was conceived during the early days of the COVID‑19
pandemic. We are first and foremost grateful to the contributors for their
hard work and solidarity during these difficult times. We believe the won‑
derful work of our contributors will make a clear intervention in both the
academic and public understanding of intertextuality and its potential. We
are also grateful to our editors at Routledge, Jennifer Abbott and Anita
Bhatt, as well as to our anonymous peer reviews for their thoughtful feed‑
back. Finally, we are deeply indebted to the support of family, friends, and
colleagues during this process.
Introduction
Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

Introduction
This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent
trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed and Kim‑
berlé Crenshaw in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic
theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland
Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Harold Bloom), updating
these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly under‑
stood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice includ‑
ing disability. Together, this approach considers the progressive impact of
the transmission and transformation of texts. This volume includes chap‑
ters on major canonical works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside
recent contemporary literature by authors such as Teju Cole and Mag‑
gie O’Farrell, as well as chapters that offer broader theoretical interven‑
tions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate
interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, including the
inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission.
The choice of intertexts are deliberately political, ethical and artistic sig‑
nifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are
thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shake‑
spearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the
Northern Irish Troubles. This collection of essays thus constitutes a cu‑
rated collection of new research in this area, with our authors sharing a
commitment to examine how intertextuality can be innovative, radical and
intersectional; we believe the diversity of the collection is a strength that
shows how intertextuality can be more central to political and ethical con‑
versations in literary studies across different subdisciplines. Instead of in‑
herently rejecting “tradition”, the writers explored in our chapters choose
what and how to reframe and repurpose from other works, as well as what
should be jettisoned. We contend that a constellation of associations is de‑
termined by both the author and the hope of a collective audience sharing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003441199-1
2 Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

in the development of an actively progressive, interactive, intersectional or

responsive open experience.
Our understanding that the intertextual can be progressive and intersec‑
tional leads to a richer mode of reading. As such, Progressive Intertextual
Practice in Modern and Contemporary Literature raises a number of issues
from accessibility to gender representation to the very value of art itself
and its ethical and political meaning to contemporary writers. In conceiv‑
ing the volume, we were conscious that the concept of intertextuality has
lost some of its radical roots, to be discussed in the critical history that
follows. “Influence” and “allusion” have a pull towards tradition, and
formalist scholars may still conceive of intertextuality as radical. But the
concept of intertextuality, which transformed the field in the late 1960s
and for some time after, is today sometimes treated as a synonym for the
traditional formalist terms which it aimed to undermine and even replace.
Intertextuality is often seen as a useful critical tool that is politically and
ethically neutral. This introduction aims to reorient both the past critical
history and the present use of intertextuality, preparing the way for chap‑
ters that offer case studies of the future use of the term. We will, firstly,
reconsider the critical history of intertextuality in the light of the theme of
this volume; secondly, we will introduce key theory that informs our un‑
derstanding of the progressive in our critical practice and, finally, address
three interrelating themes that underlie the work of the authors in this
volume (metaphors, inclusivity, and interdisciplinarity).

A Progressive History of Intertextuality

This volume reconceptualizes our current understanding of intertextu‑
ality by exploring how modern and contemporary authors and readers
can use and respond to this technique in progressive, radical and intersec‑
tional ways. This section of the introduction attends to the progressive and
radical origins of intertextuality, offering a critical history of the concept
that foregrounds these aspects, focusing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin,
Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva and their subsequent interpreters. Even
though Kristeva’s coining of the term dates back to 1966 and it is now a
widely used critical tool, the term intertextuality retains, Scarlett Baron
suggests, “a sheen of novelty”, as well as a “definitional haziness” (5–6).
While Baron has recently traced the origin of the term intertextuality back
much further to Darwin’s work on inheritance, the focus of our volume
on modern and contemporary literature means that this section will begin
with the 1960s and the work of Bakhtin, Barthes and Kristeva. Although
Baron believes the concept of intertextuality “requires a longer historical
view”, Baron also concedes the relevance of the term is especially intense
in our contemporary society:
 Introduction 3

It is in its emphasis on the fundamental interrelatedness of all textual

phenomena that much of intertextuality’s appeal resides: the startling
vista it adumbrates is one of boundless connectivity. Such an empha‑
sis is well suited to the outlook and sensibilities of writers and readers
located in a globalized, hypertextual, information‑rich world, and this
alignment of life and theory, though it postdates the invention of inter‑
textuality by forty years, has doubtless entrenched its position in critical
vocabularies. (2)

For Graham Allen too, “Intertextuality seems such a useful term because it
foregrounds notions of relationality, interconnectedness and interdepend‑
ence in modern cultural life” (5). Allen also reflects that it is important
for each account of intertextuality to reflect on its own ideological back‑
ground: “Every true vision of intertextuality starts with the unmanageable
and even unimaginable plural before defining itself (including its ideologi‑
cal stance) in its own particular modes of compression, reduction and con‑
densation” (232). For us, as the editors of the current volume, given we
have a specific investment in intertextuality as a progressive concept in
modern and contemporary literature, it makes sense to revisit the term’s
history in the light of that specific context. Here we draw upon examples
of how intertextuality was already working as a radical concept when it
was coined, appraising how each theorist or critic deploys within or be‑
yond specific political and ethical frameworks.
Allen has been writing about intertextuality for over 20 years and he
still suggests that it is impossible to offer “a fundamental definition of the
term. Such a project would be doomed to failure” (2). Instead Allen feels it
is more achievable to “return to the term’s history and to remind ourselves
of how and why it has taken on its current meanings and applications” (2).
We will therefore keep our definition brief and anchored in existing schol‑
arship, as well as focused on the aspects of intertextuality that are specific
to this volume. Intertextuality, in short, refers to the complex relation‑
ships between one text and other texts which are now taken to be inherent
to creativity. Intertextuality differs from older ideas about influence and
genetic source-hunting in several ways, but perhaps most importantly in
not creating a temporal hierarchy of literary authority: earlier texts can be
changed by newer ones and more recent texts are not merely belated. As
Dennis Cutchins explains,

The word “influence” suggests a one‑way street along which William

Shakespeare could influence Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and
Stephen Sondheim, but denies that these men could ever influence
Shakespeare. [Bakhtin’s] notion of interdetermination, on the other
hand, and the recognition that all texts, even those written four hundred
4 Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

years ago, are constantly in dialogue with other texts, suggests that West
Side Story can have an effect on the meaning of Romeo and Juliet, at
least for the person who has experienced both texts. (75)

Gertrude Postl writes that “the term intertextuality now refers to a gen‑
eral interconnectedness and mutual influence among texts, challenging the
assumption of a text as unified, independent, self‑enclosed entity” (298).
When the concept was first introduced in works by Kristeva in “Word,
Dialogue and Novel” (1966) and “The Bounded Text” (1966–1967) and
by Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1967), these theorists explained,
respectively, that intertextuality expressed a view of the literary text as “a
mosaic of quotations” (66) and “a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centers of culture” (146). Metaphors for intertextuality such
as the “mosaic” and the “tissue” proliferate: in the first subsection of this
book, Ruth Daly and Philip Miles will work in detail with metaphors for
intertextuality, using the idea of the web and the mezzanine, respectively.
Hans Bertens explains Barthes’s view in its wider and more radical sense
that intertextuality is an effect of language and culture, rather than a delib‑
erate pastiche of materials by an author:

What Barthes has in mind here is not intertextuality in the sense of

textual borrowings that derive their effect from our awareness of their
sources, but an intertextuality that practically coincides with language
itself: we cannot use language without being intertextual, without draw‑
ing on linguistic resources that others have drawn on before us. (186)

Critics such as Christos Hadjiyiannis, Gertrude Postl and Jakob Stougaard‑­

Neilsen have recently seen these original writings by Kristeva and ­Barthes
about intertextuality as a model of intertextual practice in their own
right, as well as depending on a past avant‑garde practice of fragmenta‑
tion, collage and montage, as well as methods from deconstruction and
poststructuralist thought. For example, in assessing Kristeva’s inspiration
from the modernist avant‑garde, Hadjiyiannis suggests, “Kristeva finds
in the avant‑garde a practice and a process invested with possibilities for
creative instability, radical rupture and change”, linking the style of the
avant‑garde with its aims to upend bourgeois political and ethical stand‑
ards (277). Postl connects Kristeva’s work and her “crossing of texts in
writing”, with her wish to hear minor voices and to create a deeper rela‑
tionship with history and context:

If one were to turn this use of the term “intertextuality” into a blue‑
print for a style of writing, Kristeva’s own texts would qualify. […]
Presenting herself not so much as author but as writer/reader (reader/
 Introduction 5

writer), she allows other texts to speak on their own terms, constructing
dialogues or conversations rather than pursuing a streamlined argument
from above that subordinates other voices. This practice of what might
be called “intertextual writing” succeeds in unearthing in other texts
that which has not been explicitly said, producing yet additional layers
of meaning. By interconnecting other texts with her own, Kristeva cre‑
ates a multiplicity of intersecting voices that reflect any given political
and historical currents as well as the reading/writing experience of their
“author”. (302–303)

We will shortly turn more directly to how Kristeva’s theory is able to “re‑
flect any given political and historical currents”, but it is important to
acknowledge that she practices what she preaches. Kristeva is not just
asserting a theory of intertextuality but modeling how a self‑conscious
practice of intertextuality can transform writing: especially of note is the in‑
terconnection of “minor” forms to create something new and the emphasis
on the often under‑ or un‑observed features of a perhaps more canonical
work. To give just two examples from the many in this volume, Hanaway‑­
Oakley emphasizes the experiences of the extremely minor character of the
blind stripling in Ulysses in the context of understudied blindness manuals
from the era and Woods’s writing about O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet focuses
on the historically occluded experiences of Anne Hathaway and Shake‑
speare’s children; the playwright himself only appears by elliptical allu‑
sion, off‑stage for the majority of the novel’s events, as it were. The very
invention of history in art and vice versa is the subject of both Woods and
Gehlawat, and as Kristeva prescribes, it is possible because the novels they
write about take an intertextual form. Similarly, Stougaard‑Neilsen writes
that in the case of Barthes,

The montage‑like quality of ‘The Death of the Author’ is not merely a

stylistic device fitting its publication format, but a performance of its
own attempt to script its theory of unoriginal authorship and practice
of a radical intertextuality in which multiple and disjointed discourses
flicker as quotations without quotation marks. (282)

As we have touched on already, the origins of the term intertextuality are

inherently progressive. Indeed, as Baron has argued, intertextuality’s “con‑
tinental provenance and appertaining politics” is part of what makes it
sometimes still controversial in Anglophone contexts today (5–6). Kristeva’s
coining of the term intertextuality depended on her understanding of
Bakhtin’s theories about the social construction of language through dia‑
logue, as well as his emphasis on the power of heteroglossia to disrupt
dominant ideologies. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue meant that “no work
6 Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

of art is able to stand alone in its meaning, [and this] is for Bakhtin the
best, the most human part of any work of art. All texts, finally, depend
upon us” (Cutchins, 85). Bakhtin’s work also had a strong sense of history
and was well‑adapted to political readings, and as Allen summarizes, “At
the heart of Bakhtin’s work is an argument that the dialogic, heteroglot as‑
pects of language are essentially threatening to a unitary, authoritarian and
hierarchical conception of society, art and life” (29), so that “Bakhtin’s vi‑
sion concerns a process of constant struggle, a constant unfinished dialogue
within specific social situations” (57). These progressive aspects in Bakhtin
stand behind the concept of intertextuality as Kristeva claims in a retro‑
spective essay: the term was aimed to be “a way of introducing history into
structuralism” and thus increasing the political and ethical implications of
her ideas (10). The examples Kristeva gives of where history might be in‑
troduced via intertextuality are themselves progressive in terms of politics
and ethics: among many more neutral possible examples, she refers to Mal‑
larmé’s reading in anarchism informing his poem Coup de Dés and Proust’s
reading of articles about the Dreyfus Affair as important sources for A la
Recherche, concluding that “the post‑structuralist theme of intertextuality
also gave birth to an idea that I have been trying to work on ever since […]
namely that of the connection between ‘culture’ and ‘revolt’” (10–11).
While there are pleasures and questions for the individual subject in her
work, as in her thought “plurality, of self as well as of meaning, is seen as
the source of liberation and joy”, Kristeva is also deeply invested in collec‑
tive action (55). Her participation in the Tel Quel group also highlights the
potentially radical nature of the concept of intertextuality as the work of
the group “is understood in Marxist terms as an attack on the commodifi‑
cation of thought and writing” and as “anti‑humanist and anti‑authorial”
(32). Similarly, Barthes is explicit about the revolutionary potential of get‑
ting rid of the author‑god and transferring power to the reader, much as
a democratic state might emerge from an authoritarian government: he
writes that “by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text
[…] liberates what may be called an anti‑theological activity, an activity
that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to
refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law” (147)
For Kristeva and Barthes, who were both members of Tel Quel, con‑
cepts of intertextuality are used to challenge the bourgeois values that had
grown up around the figure of the author. Allen quotes Barthes to show
what Barthes admired about Kristeva were her challenges to orthodoxy in
thought and speech and, more broadly, to authority:

Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the
last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could
take pride in; what she displaces is the already‑said, the déjà‑dit,
 Introduction 7

i.e. the instance of the signified, i.e. stupidity; what she subverts is
authority – the authority of the monologic science, of filiation. (30)

Bakhtin, Barthes and Kristeva all advocated for active, empowered read‑
ers. The concept of intertextuality creates subjects who are not satisfied
with received wisdom, whether in relation to texts, or other people, or a
wider culture. Indeed, for Kristeva, “The notion of intertextuality replaces
that of intersubjectivity” (66). In short, intertextual writers and readers are
more likely to hear minority voices and to disrupt monoglossia––and thus
to hold progressive political and ethical views.
While intertextuality would retain its radical expression in feminist
and postcolonial criticism, to be discussed in more detail in the next
section, soon after Kristeva’s coining of the term we also see a move
towards a more neutral interest in intertextuality which treats it as a
critical tool among other options, including Harold Bloom’s The Anxi‑
ety of Influence (1973), as well as in early adaptation studies. While
Bloom only directly uses the term intertextual once, in the Preface to
his study (xxxii), and never refers to Kristeva, Allen notes that Bloom
means something deeper in using the word “influence” than the con‑
ventional understanding of the term before Kristeva and Barthes (132).
Bloom in fact describes an intertextual vision of writing that partially
undermines concepts of authorship and originality: he argues that po‑
etry after Milton is driven by the desire both to imitate great poets
and to conceal their debt to past poets through deliberate misreadings.
Bloom’s divergence from influence and source hunting is clear in the
temporality of his theory, in which the belated new poet can genuinely
affect and shape the work of a previous precursor, and in its openness
to an understanding of texts as circulating within culture so that an au‑
thor can have an intertextual relationship with the literature that they
have not even read (135). However, Allen suggests that Bloom’s theory
“is actually a defence against the plurality celebrated by Barthes and
Kristeva”, particularly with regard to popular culture (137). Indeed,
Gilbert and Gubar responded directly to Bloom in relation to a “patri‑
archal theory of literature” in developing their more radical feminist
“writing back” (46–50). Subsequent approaches to intertextuality fol‑
lowing Bloom are not inherently progressive and introduced a diver‑
gence from its origins with the Tel Quel group, which explains some
confusion in approaches to intertextuality that continues to exist today.
For a sustained and serious engagement with Bloom’s legacy within the
framework of the volume, see Miles in Chapter 1. The scholars we have
been quoting from in this section have previously acknowledged these
progressive aspects of the history of the concept of intertextuality, but no
one has yet fully followed up on these insights to form a full perspective
8 Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

on the politics and ethics of intertextuality in the way that the present
volume attempts to do, both here in the introduction and in our chap‑
ters. We continue assembling this account in the following section.

Progressive and Intersectional Theory and Criticism

This volume casts fresh light on the ethical and political dynamics that ma‑
terialize in modern and contemporary literature through original readings
of texts and contexts. In this section of the introduction, we explore some
of the shared theoretical touchstones for the progressive politics found in
these chapters in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Sara Ahmed, as well
as previous feminist and postcolonial thinkers, which inform the chapters
in this volume and create powerful synergies and a strong sense of coher‑
ence between chapters. We will first offer an account of how intertextual‑
ity develops after Kristeva and Barthes in terms of its political and ethical
ramifications before turning directly to Crenshaw and Ahmed.
As highlighted in the above section, the origins of intertextuality are pro‑
gressive, especially in their implications for intersubjectivity. Birgit Schippers
writes in Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought in relation to the intersection
of Kristeva’s work with contemporary feminist thought that “Dialogism
proves central to the Kristevan concept of intertextuality: it indicates the ex‑
istence of another in language and in meaning, paving the way for Kristeva’s
theory of an ethics of alterity” (24). While Schippers addresses Kristeva’s
ambivalence about first‑wave and second‑wave feminism and holds her to
account for the way she appears to keep feminism at a distance, her chap‑
ter on Kristeva’s ethics does touch both on Kristeva’s “attempt to develop
a maternal herethics” and “on the ethical dimension of immigration and
multiculturalism” (87–88). These aspects are relevant for our new discus‑
sion of intersectionality and the politics of citation in relation to a version of
intertextuality that is alive to its progressive potential in relation to gender
and race. Despite initial anxieties from feminist and postcolonial scholars
and writers about the challenge to the author posed by the work of the Tel
Quel group, Stougaard‑Neilsen finds intertextuality a “radical” practice in
terms of both style and implications, so that subsequent thinkers in these
areas were able to use the concept of intertextuality in order to “continu[e]
and modif[y] this deconstruction of the subject and the literary canon in its
‘universalized’ state as significantly Western, white, and male” (282).
The dialogic and heteroglossic power of intertextuality is often put into
practice by feminist and postcolonial authors as a means of “writing back”
against a previously dominant discourse. A novel like Jean Rhys’s Wide
Sargasso Sea (1966), published in the same year as Kristeva’s work on
intertextuality, is a key case study for Mita Banerjee’s recent reading of
authorship in postcolonial and indigenous contexts. By reimaging Bertha
 Introduction 9

Mason as Antoinette Cosway, Rhys’s novel is a work of both second‑wave

feminist and early postcolonial “writing back”, challenging the attitudes
to gender and marriage on display in the original precursor text, Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), as well as its imperial attitude to the Carib‑
bean and colonial subjects. This work also points to different directions in
scholarship and in literary writing in the late twentieth century, including
in novels such as Rhys’s and in theory such as Sandra M. Gilbert’s and
Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) which forms a branch
of feminist thought on “writing back”. Similarly, postcolonial critics such
as Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) and postcolonial authors such as
Salman Rushdie used the technique in Midnight’s Children (1981) were
able to “write back” in order to critique the politics of Empire and move
on from it. Indeed, the phrase “writing back” was originally coined by
Rushdie in 1982 as a pun on Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, so this
concept itself has an intertextual history. As Banerjee argues,

the practice of ‘writing back’ may also have profound repercussions for
notions of authorship as such. […] There is a sense in which the literary
practice of writing back may lead to a doubling of authorship. Each
newly emerging postcolonial text that rewrites a canonical novel from
the perspective of a colonial subject […] bears an intertextual relation‑
ship to the original work. […] At the same time, it has been argued that
for a genuinely postcolonial writing to emerge, the act of ‘writing back’
can only be a first step; unless other forms of engagement follow, the
postcolonial author will continue to be mesmerized by her colonial past.
(316–317)

Banerjee highlights a need to move on from simpler forms of “writing

back”, which might include more complex intertextual models: she dis‑
cusses the indigenous Australian author Kim Scott’s novel Benang (1999)
as an example of this. Today “writing back” often depends upon inter‑
textuality, rather than influence, as even where there is a stable precursor
text feminist and postcolonial authors and critics are often resisting, and
perhaps pastiching, a much wider field of past literature and a whole previ‑
ous mode of thought.
Turning now to the specific progressive ideas which animate our authors,
it is important to address Crenshaw and Ahmed. Coined and developed in
two landmark essays by Kimberlé Crenshaw from 1989 and 1991, the
broad concept of intersectionality was recently redefined by Crenshaw as
“a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality
or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that
often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking” (n.pag.).
As Devon W. Carbado, Crenshaw herself, Vickie M. Mays and Barbara
10 Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

Tomlinson reflected in 2013 in a retrospective special issue, “Rooted in

Black feminism and Critical Race Theory, intersectionality is a method
and a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool” (303), while the concept
is “animated by the imperative of social change” (312). Crenshaw defines
her theory as “a two‑pronged intervention”, by which she seeks both to
“dismantle the instantiations of marginalization that operated within in‑
stitutionalized discourses that legitimized existing power relations” and
to criticize how “discourses of resistance could themselves function as
sites that produced and legitimized marginalization” (304). Carbado and
Crenshaw et al. go on to acknowledge how the concept of intersectional‑
ity has since been expanded to address “a range of issues, social identities,
power dynamics, legal and political systems, and discursive structures”,
with the conversation “characterized by adaptation, redirection, and con‑
testation” (304). As our work shows with continuous conscientious and
conscious adaptation, redirection and contestation, we continue in the
spirit of the authors’ insistence that “intersectional analysis or formation
is always a work‑in‑progress”, believing that “we should endeavor, on an
ongoing basis to move intersectionality to unexplored places” (304–305).
It is also important to be alert to the dangers of intersectionality’s radi‑
calism being watered down over time: as we saw with intertextuality, it
was aimed to be a radical tool but became more mainstream and politi‑
cally neutral over time. Similarly, as Anna Carastathis argues, we need
to overcome some aspects of the “main‑streaming” of intersectional‑
ity which forgets its roots in progressive and radical social movements:
“­Intersectionality‑as‑challenge urges us to grapple with and overcome our
entrenched perceptual‑cognitive habits of essentialism, categorial purity,
and segregation” (4). As editors, we were originally inspired by a broad
and open account of intersectionality, which also shares some of the em‑
phasis on plurality and social change noted in the above account of the role
of intertextuality in the work of the Tel Quel group, to import it into our
critical practice for working with intertextuality as a progressive concept,
as indicated in Hanaway‑Oakley’s work on disability and Fogarty’s work
on race and the Troubles. The authors featured in this volume found this
provocation inspiring and responded to our call for essays: here an inter‑
sectional approach is taken to topics beyond race and gender—although
race and gender are strongly addressed and the roots of the concept in
black feminism is always acknowledged—including disability in particular
which appears as theme in several essays. We hope thereby to square the
circle of using the term intersectionality respectfully, with knowledge of its
origins, but also flexibly in the spirit of keeping the term moving and trans‑
forming in a way that Crenshaw has previously supported. In short, inter‑
textuality and intersectionality have in common a progressive drive and
a concern with interrelation and enmeshing, where the individual subject
 Introduction 11

or text is seen to be part of a much wider field of culture while remaining

historically and politically conversant.
Thus, this volume demonstrates how effective intersectional histori‑
cal and political conversations become inherently intertextual. For Sara
Ahmed “intersectionality is a starting point, the point from which we must
proceed if we are to offer an account of how power works” (5). We were
similarly inspired by the recent work of Ahmed for our definition of the
progressive in relation to intertextuality. In her early monograph, Differ‑
ences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998), Ahmed
discussed the implications of Barthes’s concept of “the death of the au‑
thor” and found her perspective on the concept was still shaped by an un‑
derstanding that this theory looked different in feminist and postcolonial
contexts. As Ahmed expresses her solution to this issue,

While I agree with the critique of the theological principle [of the au‑
thor] within the text, I would also suggest that what is required is a
historicization and contextualisation of the author as an embodied sub‑
ject. By opening out the process of writing to the contexts of authorship,
such a feminist approach would not de‑limit or resolve the text, but
complicate it. (123)

As she subsequently clarifies, “sexual [or racial] difference is both struc‑

tural, delimiting or binding what is possible within a textual relation, and
open to being displaced and transformed in the process of being read dif‑
ferently” (128), concluding in relation to postcolonial writing that “the
relation between self and writing is an attempt to recognise how race and
gender are mutually implicated as differences that matter within the dis‑
cursive formations of authorship” (136). Though she does not directly
mention intertextuality, Ahmed’s nuancing of Barthes here may be tak‑
ing her closer to Kristeva’s thought, given that Kristeva’s understanding of
intertextuality includes attention to intersubjectivity. While the author for
Barthes is dead or irrelevant, Kristeva’s author is much richer and more
full of political potential: “a subject in process” and “a subject on trial”,
“a carnival, a polyphony, forever contradictory and rebellious” (2010,
10). Additionally, we see here how Ahmed is keen to find a progressive,
intersectional response to the concept of “the death of the author” and to
intertextuality more broadly, as we are in this volume.
While one of Ahmed’s key concepts, “the politics of citation”, might at
first seem opposed to Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality and the ideas it
initially suggests of a free play of voices, in fact scholars of Kristeva such
as Mary Orr have noted “Kristeva’s scrupulousness (unlike Barthes or Der‑
rida for example) in citing and referencing ideas gleaned from elsewhere”,
even in the essays that define and explore intertextuality, in particular in
12 Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

her use of Bakhtin (26). Kristeva wishes to give voice to other authors and
other texts and to treat them as interlocutors: this is part of her progres‑
sive perspective on the concept, even as eventually “prior text materials
lose special status by permutation with others in the intertextual exchange
because all intertexts are of equal importance in the intertextual process”
(28). Orr discusses quotation and citation more directly later, writing that
“Despite very different emphases, intertextuality, influence, and imitation
all include [quotation] within their aegis and agree on its identification”
(130). Due citation, as well as effective placement and reflective response,
is part of the “mosaic” effect that Kristeva was seeking in coining the con‑
cept, as well as in her aim to introduce “history into structuralism” by
identifying markers that flesh out a historical context. While Kristeva’s
work is more scrupulous with citation than the concept of intertextuality
might sound at first, Ahmed’s concept of citation is more flexible and less
academic than it sounds and often works like a mental library or memory
bank which inspires praxis. For example, Ahmed writes,

Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt

to those who came before; those who helped us find our way […] A
companion text is a text whose company enabled you to proceed on
a path less trodden. Such texts might spark a moment of revelation in
the midst of an overwhelming proximity; they might share a feeling
or give you resources to make sense of something beyond your grasp;
companion texts can prompt you to hesitate or to question the direction
in which you are going, or they might give you a sense that in going the
way you are going, you are not alone. (2017, 15–16)

Ahmed then lists key companion texts for the Living a Feminist Life pro‑
ject, including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, George Eliot’s The Mill on
the Floss, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and Toni Morrison’s The
Bluest Eye; these texts are allowed to shape both Ahmed’s writing and her
ethical and political investments in her broader life (16–17). Ahmed’s ver‑
sion of intertextuality shares some similarities with Jess Mason’s concept
of a “mental archive”, a library existing in readers’ memories which they
compare other books against, as well as her interest in collective reading
practices such as book groups (72). Mason’s monograph offers a cognitive
stylistics approach to intertextuality, both in written texts and in spoken
discourse. Ahmed also describes transformative feminist activist commu‑
nities in which books are shared and become “spaces of encounter” and
“an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility” (2017, 17). This ver‑
sion of intertextuality as a space of encounter is inspiring for the volume
as a whole. Although Crenshaw’s and Ahmed’s work inspired the genesis
of this collection for us as editors, we are considerate of how each chapter
 Introduction 13

defines progressive intertextuality for the particular author and case study
and how they see its development through modern and contemporary lit‑
eratures by pursuing their own theoretical or historical interest. The pro‑
gressive nature of this volume, both ethically and politically, for us, means
that we would rather allow our authors room to discern for themselves
rather than drawing strict boundaries, which, to our minds, go against the
nature of how they describe the development of the intertextual, and its
progressive impact, in their works. So far, we have introduced a progres‑
sive account of intertextuality and offered some strands that have shaped
our understanding of the progressive, in what remains of the introduction
we introduce the volume’s structure and the work of our authors. The
essays are gathered under the rubrics of “metaphors”, “inclusivity” and
“interdisciplinarity”, yet even as individual contributions emphasize each
of these focal points, they each advance the book’s organizing argument by
demonstrating the progressive power of intertextuality in the modern and
contemporary literature.

Metaphors for Progressive Intertextuality

In an earlier section of the introduction we explored past concepts linked
with intertextuality from theory and criticism on the topic including as
mosaic (in Kristeva), as dialogue (in Bakhtin) and as tissue and weave (in
Barthes). This opening section of this volume develops by adding meta‑
phors to a conversation about intertextuality which aims to revivify the
concept and to see it in a progressive light: the first metaphor from one of
our authors is that of the ‘mezzanine’ as an intertextual space within the
mind of the artist (Miles), while the second metaphor is of intertextual‑
ity as a web (Daly), which is related to Barthes’s ideas but distinct from
it in its ethical and political commitments. The web metaphor, develop‑
ing Barthes’s idea of the weave, was, as Allen points out, first used by
Nancy K. Miller in 1988 in Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing
(152–153). This feminist criticism of the concept of intertextuality as ap‑
plied to women was an early form of a progressive approach to intertextu‑
ality as Miller aimed to reverse the effacing of women in Barthes’s theory
by pointing out how these metaphors of weave and tissue have historically
depended on women’s work. Miller also recuperated the mythological fig‑
ure of Arachne as a metaphor for women’s status outside the dominant
discourse of signification.
The first chapter in this section, and in the volume as a whole, is
Philip Miles’s “Authorship, the ‘mezzanine’, and late‑modern anxiety:
the ‘metaphysics’ of the creative writing process” where he introduces a
new metaphor for intertextuality, that of “the mezzanine”, which allows
him to explore progressive and intersectional aspects of creativity. Miles’s
14 Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

chapter draws on past original ethnographic research which focussed on

the routines of creativity amongst musicians, artists and literary authors
with additional focus on locations of creative practice. Miles’s intellectual
focus here will relate to a process that he conceptualized as “the mezza‑
nine”, a psychological, liminal/transient “state” experienced by either an
author or a reader when encountering the development, or consumption,
of text. In this chapter, the utilization of the concept will apply to authorial
intention (and lack of reader control on associative interpretation) in the
works of contemporary authors to observe how the mezzanine is governed
by incongruous thought and an unconscious sense of destiny—thus, the
creating individual cannot be sure where the “action” of creativity is fated,
or even if the action itself will emerge, let alone conceive of preordained
forces of influence as shaping the flow of words that could not have “ever
existed before”.
The other chapter in this section is Ruth Daly’s theoretical intervention,
“De‑disciplining criticism: refiguring reading as a mode of response‑ability”,
which examines how thinking intertextuality in terms of progressive and
intersectional practice may provide conceptual resources for the formula‑
tion of reading practices that allow de‑ phallicizing, de‑disciplining and
de‑colonizing the study of texts as living bodies. This inquiry focuses on
readings which acknowledge lived histories and experiences that are mate‑
rially inscribed in texts rather than readings focused on the classification of
ideas, theories, tendencies or debates. Reframing intertextuality as a mode
of intersectional engagement, Daly argues, foregrounds profoundly ethi‑
cal, if not political, dimensions of reading, which are at risk of becoming
further entangled within traditional disciplining structures in which read‑
ing is at risk of collapsing into a master/object relation. Such d­ imensions—
lived relations of negotiation through shared systems of support, love and
hospitality as exemplified by the various texts Daly brings into conversa‑
tion using écriture féminine—lead to an unstitching of notions of a single
story, challenging traditional epistemologies.

Progressive Intertextuality and Inclusivity

The chapters in the middle section of this volume have in common an
emphasis on intertextuality in relation to the progressive value of various
kinds of inclusivity: the chapters offer new perspectives on how marginal
identities including the blind man and the witch might be better repre‑
sented through the use of intertextual techniques. Earlier in the introduc‑
tion we explored how Kristeva claimed, “The notion of intertextuality
replaces that of intersubjectivity” and we added to this an understanding
of how this principle could lead readers and writers to disrupt monoglossia
and to understand difference (66). These chapters are a key expression of
 Introduction 15

that potential within this volume. In her response to Barthes in Differences

That Matter, Ahmed is particularly concerned about the effacing of the
body and identity within the concept of “the death of the author”, which
would be especially problematic in relation to gender, race and sexuality
but also in relation to illness and disability: “The loss of a specific body,
a specific figure which is writing and written into the body of writing,
suggests that, within the context of Barthes’s piece, writing is written by
no‑body, no‑body who is identified as subject of body” (1998, 122–123)
Ahmed later writes that “intersectionality is messy and embodied”
(2017, 119). The authors feature a concern with progressive intertextual‑
ity in relation to mind and body and use disability studies and medical
humanities approaches in considering how modern and contemporary de‑
pictions of mind and body are caught up in intertextuality but they are not
afraid to sometimes critique these methods or to supplement them with
other techniques and approaches. Each author is particularly alive to the
power of returning to past scholarship, by biographers of James Joyce and
by William Shakespeare or by literary theorists, and offering a significant
revision, often led by a consciousness of the progressive power of intertex‑
tuality, which can help us view texts and subjects more sensitively and can
potentially help us to be more inclusive in our daily life.
The first essay in this section, Cleo Hanaway‑Oakley’s “The Blind as Seen
through Blind Eyes: An Intertextual Approach to Visual Impairment in
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)” uses a disability studies approach in order to
consider the progressive value of intertextuality. By reading James Joyce’s
depiction of the “blind stripling” in Ulysses alongside fin de siècle Parisian
blindness memoirs and manuals, this chapter will bring the phenomenol‑
ogy of the body—via authors’ lived experiences of visual ­impairment—
into productive dialogue with Joyce’s text, to offer a multi‑focal approach
to non‑normative eyesight. Hanaway‑Oakley proposes that the origin of
the “blind stripling”—who is encountered by Bloom in the “Lestrygoni‑
ans” episode of Ulysses—lies, partly at least, in Joyce’s interest in blindness
memoirs and manuals. By reading Joyce’s text alongside texts written by
people with visual impairments for people with visual impairments includ‑
ing Les Aveugles par un Aveugle (The Blind as Seen through Blind Eyes)
by Maurice de la Sizeranne (1889) and The Blind Man’s World: Advice to
People Who Have Recently Lost Their Sight (1903 in French; translated
into English in 1904), Hanaway‑Oakley is able to offer a new perspective
that builds upon, and goes beyond, insights provided by genetic, disability
studies and biography‑focused approaches.
The next essay in this section, Orlagh Woods’s “‘This creature, this
woman, this elf, this sorceress, this forest sprite’: Negotiating Authorship
and Reconfiguring Motherhood in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020)”
draws on fields of motherhood studies and adaptation studies in search
16 Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan

of a progressive intertextuality. Woods argues that the recent feminist

mobilizations of the grotesque can provide a productive framework through
which to read a recent novelization of Shakespeare that foregrounds moth‑
erhood. The process of adapting a dramatic text into the novel form creates
space to explore the hidden voices of marginalized or subtextual charac‑
ters that can contribute to the diversification of Shakespeare. O’Farrell’s
Hamnet (2020) builds upon scholarly speculations that the death of Shake‑
speare’s young son in 1596 inspired the play. Significantly, O’Farrell de‑
thrones Shakespeare in the narrative and instead breathes new life into the
maligned figure of Anne Hathaway. While disparaging Shakespeare biog‑
raphers have condemned Anne Hathaway’s illiteracy, O’Farrell reinscribes
her character Agnes, who stands for Anne, with an exhaustive knowledge
of pharmacology that affords her an alternative, matrilineal intellectual lin‑
eage that is often denied by historical and biographical accounts.

Progressive Intertextuality and Interdisciplinarity

This part of the introduction considers intertextuality in the context of
interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, preparing for
the final section of the volume which considers this specifically. Intertex‑
tuality as it emerged in the Tel Quel milieu was immediately interdiscipli‑
nary: as Postl reflects, “Tel Quel’s appeal for Kristeva – apart from personal
­affiliations – was its focus on the intersection of literature, politics and phi‑
losophy which she expanded with the areas of linguistics and semiotics”
(297), while Orr has previously claimed that Kristeva’s work was substan‑
tially more interdisciplinary than the research of her peers at Tel Quel (23).
Allen’s work has been essential in exploring the relevance of intertextual‑
ity for other art forms, inspiring us to include this section in the volume:
for Allen, intertextuality “is a term by no means exclusively related to
literary works, or even simply to written communication” and “has been
adapted by critics of non‑literary art forms such as painting, ­music and
architecture” (5). Allen concludes that “intertextuality can often radically
challenge established accounts of non‑literary art forms” (171). Allen uses
postmodernism as a lens for interpreting an implicitly progressive role for
intertextuality and interdisciplinarity as he is particularly interested in pas‑
tiche and parody in postmodernism and whether there can be resistance to
cultural norms through these intertextual techniques (176).
Another relevant term for this section is the concept of “intermedial‑
ity” and its relation to intertextuality: while some scholars are happy to
use intertextuality more or less interchangeably with intermediality, other
critics may wish to use intermediality only when there is a clear jump in
medium (220). For Irina O. Rajewsky, intermediality is further divided
between three subcategories: medial transposition (film adaptations or
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