Antique Lands, New Worlds? Comparative Literature, Intertextuality, Translation*

Abstract

When it comes to labelling the re-writing relationship obtaining between postcolonial works of literature and their colonial predecessors, instead of speaking in terms of “influence”, which would imply a hierarchically construed historical relationship valorising the work in the “mother” culture over its postcolonial counterpart, we would do better to speak of what I will call “bound intertextuality”, something that is stricter than a mere referential use of intertextuality, yet looser than what we usually label a “translation”. Such bound intertextuality may manifest itself on all levels of the work of literature, including the use of genre. In the analytical part of my article, I try to show how Amitav Ghosh's 1992 In an Antique Land “intertextually translates” Shelley's “Ozymandias” from a postcolonial perspective.