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46 - Intertextuality
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- By Betty Hagglund, Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, England
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 133-135
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Summary
The term ‘intertextuality’ (intertextualité) is a modern one, coined by Julia Kristeva in 1967. The theory of intertextuality suggests that a text needs to be read in the light of its allusions to and differences from the content or structure of other texts. No text functions as a completely closed system. As Worton and Still (1990, 1–2) argue: ‘Firstly, the writer is a reader of texts before s/he is a creator of texts, and therefore the work of art is inevitably shot through with references, quotations and influences of every kind[…] Secondly, a text is only available through some process of reading; what is produced at the moment of reading is due to the cross-fertilisation of the packaged textual material […] by all the texts which the reader brings to it.’
Intertextuality emphasizes the dialogic nature of reading and writing. The ‘literary word’, writes Kristeva (1980, 65–66), is ‘an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings […] each word (text) is an intersection of other words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read.’ Intertextuality creates relationships between texts, both for readers and writers. Although the word is relatively new, travel writing has, of course, been both implicitly and explicitly intertextual for centuries. Travel writing is often overtly intertextual, but, as is true for other genres, it also exists within a network of ‘partially denied or unacknowledged intertexts’ (Hulme 2002a, 223).
The explicit use of intertextuality within travel narratives serves a variety of functions. It can corroborate the truth-value of the text – someone else has done or seen or said the same thing. It can also serve to establish the travel writer as an authoritative figure, one who has done his research before leaving home and whose information can be trusted, although the author may still need to emphasize the primacy of his text. The Victorian traveller Eliot Warburton (1845, xiii) wrote that before visiting the East he had read the accounts of many previous travellers, but he assured his audience that he had ‘not (intentionally) […] used the thoughts of any author’, and that therefore they could trust in the ‘novelty’ of his impressions.
26 - Domestic Ritual
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- By Betty Hagglund, Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, England
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 75-77
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Summary
‘Domestic ritual’ refers to the set of tasks performed in a house which helps to preserve the continuity of the house and the life lived therein. Travel is often thought of as an escape from home and domesticity. Critics have claimed that travel allows travellers, particularly women, to free themselves from the constraints of domestic life. Far from being an alternative to homemaking and domesticity, however, travellers – both men and women – spend much of their time in a kind of displaced home-making, creating and re-creating temporary home spaces. Beyond this, the way in which travel is written frequently replicates the rhythm of domestic ritual. There are three main strands: the objects and artefacts that travellers bring with them from home and use to re-create home in the new environment; rituals with which travellers make a new place into a home; the writing of travel and its parallels in domestic ritual.
Tim Youngs (1997, 118) has written: ‘For travellers the relationship to commodities that are taken with them becomes an important means of negotiating and affirming identity at a time when it is under threat […] worries about the instability of self can be displaced onto commodities.’ Repeatedly we find lists of objects taken appearing in accounts of travel, the listing itself part of the way in which travellers establishes their identity. For Sarah Murray (1799, 39), travelling into the Highlands of Scotland before the advent of a touristic infrastructure, a list of necessary items served to establish the possibility of being ‘at home’ in the wilds and establishing control over a land where the sublimity of the landscape threatened to overwhelm her: ‘For the inside of the carriage, get a light flat box […] the side next the travellers should fall down […] to form a table on their laps […] holes for wine bottles, to stand upright in […] tea, sugar, bread, and meat; a tumbler glass, knife and fork, and saltcellar, with two or three napkins.’ Murray created ‘home’ in her carriage, fitted out in ways which allowed her to dine with the manners and refinements of her upperclass London home and to set herself apart from both the landscape and the natives of Scotland.
Chapter 2 - Quakers and the Printing Press
- Edited by Stephen W. Angell, Pink Dandelion, University of Birmingham
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- Book:
- Early Quakers and Their Theological Thought
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 08 July 2015, pp 32-47
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