Tag: intertextuality
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The between spaces in Jason Allen-Paisant’s ‘Self-Portrait as Othello’
Jason Allen-Paisant won the 2023 Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for “Self-Portrait as Othello,” joining poets Sean O’Brien and Seamus Heaney in this rare accomplishment. His collection explores identity, racism, and coming-of-age in a foreign country, using space on the page to enhance the thematic caesurae and embodying the struggle of the ‘other’ in…
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‘The Outsider’ redux: Nadifa Mohamed’s ‘The Fortune Men
Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men (Viking, 2021) won the Wales Book of the Year in 2022. It is a fictional retelling of the tragic miscarriage of justice of Somali Mahmood Mattan in 1950s Cardiff. In the book, Mattan is executed for the murder of British Jew Violet Volacki, a crime he strenuously denied. While the…
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Anne Enright’s ‘Actress’ (part 1): finding a mother
In this and my next blog (also on Actress), I’m going to focus on intertextuality. Intertextuality was described by Julia Kristeva as a mosaic of interaction between texts.[1] For Kristeva, this quite commonly takes the form of deliberate and explicit intertextual references—quotations, narrative nods, character types and names—but I am most interested in intertextuality that…