Abstract
The aim of the present paper is to analyse intertextual relations based on activation of textual codes in the famous chain of works by Virgil (The Aeneid 1990), Dante (The Divine Comedy) that continues through romanticists and up to the modernist literature (T. S. Eliot The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets) taking T.S. Eliot`s essays on literature as the basis for our analysis. Homer`s Odyssey and Iliad serve as a hypertext for these works in which each author develops in his own way the thematic codes from the works of his predecessors thus affirming the continuity of a single cultural tradition -- “from Homer and within it…”. Keywords: Cultural tradition, intertextuality, classics.
Highlights
In his essays on literature T.S.Eliot outlines European cultural space within which intertextual relations take place
T.S.Eliot in the essay “Goethe as the Sage” (211) in the essay “What is a Classic?” (70) He treats European literature as a whole, the several members of which cannot flourish, if the same blood-stream does not circulate throughout the whole body
The blood-stream of European literature is Latin and Greek – not as two systems of circulation, but one, for it is through Rome that our parentage in Greece must be traced and each literature has its greatness, not in isolation, but because of its place in a larger pattern, a pattern set in Rome (What is a Classic?, 70)
Summary
In his essays on literature T.S.Eliot outlines European cultural space within which intertextual relations take place. The blood-stream of European literature is Latin and Greek – not as two systems of circulation, but one, for it is through Rome that our parentage in Greece must be traced and each literature has its greatness, not in isolation, but because of its place in a larger pattern, a pattern set in Rome (What is a Classic?, 70). This brings us to the question of a classic and the role of Roman culture in the development of Western civilization. When a work of literature has an equal significance in relation to a number of foreign literatures, we may say that it has universality (What is a Classic?, 59, 67)
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