This volume comprises sixteen essays, preceded by an introductory chapter focusing on the diverse modalities of textual, and more widely, artistic transfer. Whereas the first Rewriting-Reprising volume (coord. by C. Maisonnat, J. Paccaud-Huguet & A. Ramel) underscored the crucial issue of origins, the second purports to address the specificities of hypertextual, and hyperartistic (Genette, 1982) practices. Its common denominator is therefore second degree literature and art. A first section, titled “Pastiche, Parody, Genre and Gender,” delineates what amounts to a poetics of rewriting/reprising, by investigating a whole range of authorial stances, from homage – through a symphonic play of intertexts – to varying degrees of textual deviance, or dissidence. Some genres, like the fairy tale or the Gothic, through their very malleability, are indeed more apt to lend themselves to rewriting/reprising. However, hypertextuality is not merely ornamental, or purely aesthetic; its subversive potential is perceptible notably through its many attempts at emancipating the genre from the ideological fetters of gender. Over the past two decades, Victorian literature and culture has become an inescapable field of investigations to any study on intertextuality in the English-speaking world. In a second part, diversity has been preferred to any single, specific angle to approach the Victorian/neo-Victorian tropism. The purpose is to provide as complete a spectrum as is reasonably possible in such a volume. The practice of rewriting in the Victorian age is thus studied alongside contemporary appropriations of the Victorian canon. The question is raised of whether literary fetishism may not result in a form of counterfeit classicism, while the more challenging neo-Victorian rewritings would make a claim for the need to choose one’s literary heritage and ancestors. This is where the post-colonial agenda comes in. Precisely, the third part investigates the question of rewriting-reprising as a way of writing back. The myth of Frankenstein’s creature bent on wreaking vengeance on his creator is of course seminal as it offers a myth of transgression which, in its turn, becomes a “foundation myth.” Not only are post-colonial responses to their (disclaimed) parent-texts highly theory-informed, but they also evince an awareness of such contemporary issues which are direct consequences of the colonial past. In the last section of this volume, the scope of what comes within the range of intertextuality per se is widened to cover artistic dialogism. In the exchanges between theatrical texts, reprise may be construed as a metaphor standing for the pleasure inherent in the process of recreation. The interaction between embedded paintings and the embedding canvas offers yet another variation on the reprise motif, as does the meta-aesthetic discourse of the critic on the work of art. What begins as mere repetition is soon colored by the personal inflections of the interpreter. In operatic performances, updating a classical text to make it suitable to contemporary audiences, and in close harmony with the role assigned to music, is liable to spur on the creativity of recreation.

This volumes includes a series of 17 selected essays, preceded by a methodological introduction, whose purpose is to offer a fresh outlook on the question of rewriting-reprising. The argument, taking for granted the phenomenon of intertextuality, develops along three main axes: the first one reconsiders the already debated issue of authority on post-structuralist premises, arguing that the origin of a text is untraceable. The second looks at a phenomenon often associated with reprising, especially in a post-colonial context: trauma, whether individual or historical, in relation to creative repetition. The third axis offers a re-reading of the question of voice, introducing the notion of the textual voice, understood as that part of the enunciative act over which the author has no control. When writers make of reprising a deliberate practise, we are tempted to believe that their position, between homage and pillage, presupposes the existence of a traceable source of the literary Word. We must however face the problematic nature of enunciation, the void on which is is founded. Which leads us to the proposition that the act of reprising is a creation ex nihilo: a certain mode of organisation around that void. Besides, in a century of major man-made traumas, whose effect was the tearing up of social fabrics, reprising will assume a more complex significance: the symptomatic, repetitive stitching of what is being constantly ripped up.

The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect' in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the 'excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the 'excessive' female embodiment.

This book brings together a variety of perspectives to explore the role of literature in the aftermath of political conflict, studying the ways in which writers approach violent conflict and the equally important subject of peace. Essays put insights from Peace and Conflict Studies into dialog with the unique ways in which literature attempts to understand the past, and to reimagine both the present and the future, exploring concepts like truth and reconciliation, post-traumatic memory, historical reckoning, therapeutic storytelling, transitional justice, archival memory, and questions about victimhood and reparation. Drawing on a range of literary texts and addressing a variety of post-conflict societies, this volume charts and explores the ways in which literature attempts to depict and make sense of this new philosophical terrain. As such, it aims to offer a self-conscious examination of literature, and the discipline of literary studies, considering the ability of both to interrogate and explore the legacies of political and civil conflict around the world. The book focuses on the experience of post-Apartheid South Africa, post-Troubles Northern Ireland, and post-dictatorship Latin America. The recent history of these regions, and in particular their acute experience of ethno-religious and civil conflict, make them highly productive contexts in which to begin examining the role of literature in the aftermath of social trauma. Rather than a definitive account of the subject, the collection defines a new field for literary studies, and opens it up to scholars working in other regional and national contexts. To this end, the book includes essays on post-1989 Germany, post-9/11 United States, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sierra Leone, and narratives of asylum seeker/refugee communities. This volume’s comparative frame draws on well-established precedents for thinking about the cultural politics of these regions, making it a valuable resource for scholars of Comparative Literature, Peace and Conflicts Studies, Human Rights, Transitional Justice, and the Politics of Literature.

This book offers to delineate a key phenomenon in contemporary Anglophone fiction: novel expansion, when the plot and characters from a finished novel are retrieved to be developed in new adventures set before, after or during the narrative time of the source-text. If autographic and allographic sequels are almost as old as literature, prequels – that imagine the anteriority of a narrative – and coquels – that develop secondary characters in the same story time as the source-text – are more recent. The overall trend for novel expansion spread in the mid-1980s and 1990s and has since shown no sign of abating. This volume is organised following three types of relationships to the source-texts even if these occasionally combine to produce a more complex structure. This book comprises 11 essays, preceded by an introduction, that examine narrative strategies, aesthetic, ethical and political tendencies underlying these novel expansions. Following the overview provided in the introduction, the reader will find case studies of prequels, coquels and sequels before a final chapter that encompasses them all and more.

'Theatre as Alter/“Native” in Derek Walcott' attempts a close and detailed politico-aesthetic analysis of his major plays. At the core of this book lies the attempt to answer the question of how postcolonial artists and intellectuals have dared to imagine radically different ways of living in the face of oppositional, binary choices. And as the title suggests, Walcott’s plays carve out critical spaces for new narratives of “becoming” and alternative priorities, entangled in contesting identities inscribed by race, language and ethnicity. Theatre, as Walcott knew, would be instrumental in demystifying Caribbean “Absence” and “Void” and generating an alternative version of dominant reality. By a deliberate unseating of the Western texts, filled with banal stereotypes and their representational biases, and by triggering “re-action” to the scripts of the colonizers in profoundly paradoxical ways, Walcott’s plays affirm the Caribbean identity. This study seeks to demonstrate how his plays open an alter/“native” universe in terms of aesthetics, dramaturgy and the performative, and reclaims ‘New World’ identity in terms of negotiation rather than negation—undermining the claim of “solid”, “authentic” culture. Placing the arts at the forefront of nation-building, Walcott situated his plays at a crucial juncture between the passing of the Empire and the newly-born Federation in his archipelago.

In this study, Jonathan Huddleston examines Genesis as a rhetorical whole, addressing Persian-era Judean expectations. While some have contrasted Genesis' account of origins with prophetic accounts of the future, literary and historical evidence suggests that Genesis narrates Israel's origins precisely in order to ground Judea's hopes for an eschatological restoration. Promises to the ancestors semiotically apply to those who preserved, composed, and received the text of Genesis. Judea imagines its mythic destiny as a great nation exemplifying and spreading blessing among the families of the earth. Genesis' vision of Israel's destiny coheres with the postexilic prophetic eschatology, identifying Israel as a precious seed to carry forward promises of a yet-to-be-realized creation fruitfulness.