Abstract
After having examined the Woolfian ‘ventriloquists’, who dialogue with and pay homage to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway while at the same time injecting fresh meanings into it, the present chapter is devoted to Woolfian ‘epigones’, who recycle, imitate, challenge, exaggerate and subvert the hypotext, mainly by inserting in their texts various forms of metafictional material to reflect on the source-text and shatter its hegemony. Based on three texts, John Crace’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (extracted from Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century [2008]), Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (extracted from Twitterature [2009]) and a passage from David Lodge’s The British Museum is Falling Down (1964), I raise questions on the practice of rewriting against the Woolfian grain, of using and abusing the canonical text, of assassinating and resurrecting it. My aim is to observe the hypertextual dynamics created by the imitation and transformation of the hypotext and to assess the aesthetic and cultural stakes of this kind of second-degree narrative.1
Published Version
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