Intertextual Encoding in the Writing of Women's Literary History

Abstract

This paper explores theoretical and practical aspects of intertextuality, in relation to the highly interpretative tag within the SGML tagset developed by the Orlando Project for its history of women's writing in the British Isles. Arguing that the concept of intertextuality is both crucial to and poses particular challenges to the creation of an encoding scheme for literary historical text, it outlines the ways in which the project's tags address broader issues of intertextuality. The paper then describes the specific tag in detail, and argues on the basis of provisional results drawn from the Orlando Project's textbase that despite the impossibility of tracking intertextuality exhaustively or devising a tagset that completely disambiguates the concept, this tag provides useful pathways through the textbase and valuable departure points for further inquiry. Finally, the paper argues that the challenges to notions of rigour posed by the concept of intertextuality can help us fruitfully to examine some of the suppositions (gendered and other) that we bring to electronic text markup.