Intertextuality In The Novel And Jane Austen's Jane Eyre

Works of literature are built from systems, codes and traditions which are established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forms and of culture are crucial to meaning of a work of literature. Texts are viewed by modern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. This is called intertextuality. A text is permutation of texts, an intertextuals in the space of a given text, in which several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.

Intertextuality as a term is first used by Julia Kristeva in Word, Dialogue and Novel. She proposes the text as a dynamic site in which relational processes and practices are the focus of analysis instead of static structures and

Prequel is a literary work whose story precedes that of a previous work by focussing on events that occur before the original narrative. Jean Rhys’s The Wide Saragasso Sea is prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Sequel is a literary text that continues or expands up the story of some earlier work. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is sequel to P.B. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley. Pastiche is a literary text that imitates the style or character of the work of one or other artists, celebrating it. Sherlock Homes has become as pastiche to many stories. Parody is just opposite of pastiche mocking its characters. the novel Shameela by Henry Fielding (1742), which was a parody of the gloomy epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson.

Metatextuality: when a text takes up a relation of commentary to another text it unites a given text to another which it speaks without necessarily citing it, in fact sometimes even without naming it. Literary criticism occupies a vital part in popularizing the particular text. Robert Heitman’s The Great Stage is metatextuality to King

He defines hypertext as every text derived from a previous one by means of direct or indirect transformation, but not through commentary. What Genette terms the hypotext is termed by most other critics the inter-text that is a text which can be definitely located as a major source of significations for a text. His hypertextuality might seem rather similar to his architextuality, because he is not concerned with a general facet of language, or culturally signifying practices, but with a generic aspect of the closed system of literature. The main difference between hypertextuality and architextuality is that whilst pastiche, parody and caricature are essentially and intentionally hypertextual, tragedy, comedy, the novel and the lyric are based on the notion of imitation of generic modals rather specific hypotexts.

The meaning of hypertextual world depends upon the reader’s knowledge of the hypotext which the hypertext either satirically transforms or imitates for the purpose of pastiche.

Last orders by Graham Swift to As I lay dying by