Romantic Intertextuality: The Adaptive Weave

Abstract

weave represents a network of allusive threads that, once plotted, enables an enhanced understanding of Romantic-period intertextuality. OED defines as The need for one text to be read in light of its allusions to and differences from content or structure of other texts; (allusive) relationship between esp. literary texts. most familiar methods by which authors refer to other authors and their tropes and themes in both oblique and obvious ways are through borrowing, allusion, plagiarism, and quotation. A few eminent critics such as Adela Pinch (1997), Tilar Mazzeo (2006), and Stuart Curran (2008) have allowed readers to critique and complicate this notion, moving away from an assumption of anxiety and its attendant need to situate self by annihilating predecessor. At same time, critics have perhaps not yet fully fathomed a model that is more than bilateral. Most investigations look at how x has incorporated y; I would like to offer some thoughts on what might be called warp and weft of literary cross-reference, in which work of writing meshes with work readers see female characters undertaking: manipulating threads to construct something new and comprehensive and yet visibly product of many strands. And so, pace Roland Barthes (1989), my counter to intertextuality is weaving, activity of using and reusing literary heritage to forward and maintain narrative (see also Stanford Friedman, 1991). Barthes maintains that act of weaving is, essentially, undercover: that is, it hides its own pattern. As he comments, the quotations a text is made of are anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read: they are quotations without quotation marks ( 60). adaptive weaver, however, pulls visibly on threads of text that both underpin and overlay pattern of plot. I begin with Charlotte Smith, whose work, as Curran (2008) has demonstrated, absolutely teems with allusiveness. But, as well as displaying her familiarity with foundational voices of her literary heritage (which of course includes European as well as British progenitors), she also threads her narratives, over and under like weft, with their patterns. For instance, to enter world of Romantic hero for a moment, and reflecting on his usual pattern in standard novel of sensibility, familiar picture is of someone who is, if not fully perfect, at least fully deserving of hand of heroine from his first appearance. hero's virtues are enhanced by competition he faces from foils like libertine and fop. Smith's novels give due prominence to Romantic hero; however, she also complicates his role. Smith rewrites genre from within; by stretching warp as tightly as possible, her novels follow familiar Romantic pattern while subverting attractions of main male player. Smith anchors this in Petrarchan, Wertheresque, or Rousseauvian behaviour on die part of her heroes. Self-absorbed; devoted to an unreal ideal of love; unable to see their beloved outside of stark, innocent/ compromised binaries; convinced of universality of their unstable feelings; wanderers; at mercy of their self-conceptions: just about all of Smith's heroes fit at least some of these parameters, noted by scholars such as Gerhart Hoffmeister (1990), Lilian Furst (1990) and Steven Sondrup (1990) as closely identified with Continental literary tradition. As she works out her plots, French, German and Italian modes usually function problematically, something not unique to Smith but rather inherent in her patterns: Petrarch, Werther and Rousseau offer difficult forms of manhood. By piecing together past and present, Smith does something different from intertextual allusion: she imports and then interweaves patterns so that standard male characters of novel of sensibility are developed into inhabitants of a modern world in which conflict, confusion, irrationality, and faulty decision-making are rife. …