Intertextuality and Victorian Studies

Intertextuality and Victorian Studies explores the recall of the Victorians, displayed by select novels ranging in time from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990). These Victorianist novels are complex studies of Victorian literature, society and modes of representation. Their sophistication derives from an awareness of their textual identity, and their interaction with the Victorian period is best described as intertextual, in which paradigms like genre and gender play an important role in contributing to textual self-consciousness. Since the Victorianist novel returns to the Victorian past without losing track of its rootedness in the present, it ensures that its readers are alive to the simultaneous presence of the world within the novel, and the world in which the novel is being read. Intertextuality becomes focussed in this study through the question, ‘How do we understand and interpret the Victorians?’ What emerges is the dynamic nature of intertextual operations that anticipate as well as foster fissures, openings, portals, boundaries and margins, thereby ensuring the ongoing nature of literary tradition.