Intertextuality and Figuration

Intertextuality and Figuration offers a theory and practice of intertextuality that revolves around figuration, the process of making and remaking figures. Drawing on close readings of key texts, including Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, Toni Morrison's Sula, Beloved, Jazz and Love, Jackie Kay's Trumpet and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater, Pelagia Goulimari examines how five major authors engage in complex dialogues that challenge conventional understandings of literary influence and genealogy, creating a web of literary relationships that resists hierarchical ancestor-descendant models in favour of horizontal, rhizomatic connections. Goulimari demonstrates through precise textual analysis how these five writers and their figural practices redefine core concepts of text and intertextuality, moving beyond the familiar Bakhtin, Kristeva and Barthes narratives to encompass more diverse genealogies.

In Part One, Goulimari reveals how Toni Morrison is in intertextual dialogue with Woolf and Soyinka by adopting and adapting figures in their texts. In Part Two, Goulimari turns to Kay and Emezi and their intertextual dialogue with figures in Morrison’s texts. These are figures of modernity, subjectivity and (inter)textuality. These figures are diagnostic, critical, reconstructive. Figures include: “falling,” “burning,” “shredding” and “tunnelling”; “crossing” over to “the other side,” “the Clearing” and “flesh that weeps, laughs, dances”; “spinning” “round and round,” “the bottomless ground” and “the bottomless gift”; “holding” and “shedding.” In their polysemy, ambiguity and plasticity, figures undergo continuous variation, as they encounter, blend or clash with other figures.

This innovative book crosses established canons, their divisions and boundaries to bring together authors who have not previously been studied in dialogue. It is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in global and transnational women’s writing, comparative literature, and literary theory.