Abstract
Many women writers employ intertextuality to question gender identity and
 to produce female characters who are free of the narratives that have proven to
 be violent, oppressive and not viable for the contemporary female experience.
 In this article, I propose a reading of Kate Atkinson’s 2000 novel, Emotionally Weird in the light of
 Bakhtin’s argument on intertextuality in novelistic discourse to understand how
 the novel rewrites the gendered individual. Emotionally
 Weird combines the quest for a new female character and the investigation
 of postmodern novel’s relation to previous novelistic discourses. Kate Atkinson
 stages a quest of identity, crystallized in Euphemia Stuart Murray’s search for
 her true parentage, which merges with the quest of the paternity of the novel
 searched through the rewritings of literary traditions. The new woman that
 emerges when these quests are resolved is an illegitimate woman writer; a
 bastard born out of wedlock who disrupts the law of inheritance while the
 postmodern novel is similarly shown as an illegitimate novelistic discourse
 born out of its dialogism with previous novelistic discourses and other
 literary forms.
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