French literary theorist Julia Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ in 1966 to describe layered patterns and connections between texts. Sometimes these links are overt: Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel The Testaments, for example, must be read in the light (or shadow) of her 1985 signature work The Handmaid’s Tale, to which it is the sequel. As we cross-reference and catalogue new texts we increase our readerly knowledge. Tracing underlying structures and/or specific references to older texts can reveal how narratives work.
Relating Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to Charlotte Brontë ’s Jane Eyre (1847) requires us to interrogate the prequel’s inclusion of what the original left out, shaping and enriching our responses to both texts and contexts. By rewriting and over-writing Brontë, Rhys carves out a narrative space in which to explore issues of gender, sexuality, madness, race and power in a way that’s both fresh and familiar.
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