“I Get My Culture Where I Can:” Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
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Sandra Heinen
Abstract
Although references to various literary, pictorial and musical works of art are central to the meaning and aesthetics of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, the critical discussion has so far mainly focussed on its relationship to Forster’s Howards End and widely refrained from a functional interpretation of On Beauty’s intertextuality. While HowardsEnd is an important reference point, the full functional potential of the novel’s intertextuality can only be described in a wider and more differentiated analysis. As a contribution to such an analysis, this paper distinguishes between three functions of OnBeauty’s intertextuality: it is argued that in Smith’s novel intertextuality is (a) a means of constituting the storyworld, (b) a means of staging the novel’s central themes and (c) a means of poetological self-positioning.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Variations on Dickens’s Great Expectations: Lloyd Jones’s Mr. Pip
- ‘Race’ and Realism: Vision, Textuality, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
- ‘Language is the House We Live in:’ Language-Centeredness and the Limits of Political Activism in Post-War American Poetry (1950-1980)
- “A Prophet out of Gwalia:” The Poetry of Idris Davies and Postcolonial Wales
- “I Get My Culture Where I Can:” Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Variations on Dickens’s Great Expectations: Lloyd Jones’s Mr. Pip
- ‘Race’ and Realism: Vision, Textuality, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
- ‘Language is the House We Live in:’ Language-Centeredness and the Limits of Political Activism in Post-War American Poetry (1950-1980)
- “A Prophet out of Gwalia:” The Poetry of Idris Davies and Postcolonial Wales
- “I Get My Culture Where I Can:” Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
