How does intertextuality function within Mrs. Dalloway? What does it mean when Clarissa says she had, in her youth, “Othello’s feelings . . . as strongly as Shakespeare” (35) for Sally Seaton as she gets ready for a dinner at which she will be in attendance? Why are the characters in Septimus’s story reading and rereading Antony & Cleopatra? And how might these moments be read given Woolf’s own riffs on Shakespeare and her construction of Shakespeare’s sister?
The Modernist Novel
ENGL 387, Professor Allred, Spring 2021
I like it. You might take a look at Eliot’s famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which basically argues that new literature must grow out of a deep familiarity with “the whole of literature from Homer to the present” in order to “count.” This argument has taken a beating for its ethnocentrism, and fairly enough, but you might think about how Woolf, as a feminist writer, both draws energy from a patriarchal tradition and critiques it. Shakes is an interesting site for intertextuality, too, since I can think of almost no writers who rival him for expansive reimaginings of gender and sexual identity, and Woolf often tried to build up a portfolio of writers who question gender norms like this (Proust is an unmasculine male writer she admires, for example). So, some searches for “woolf” and “shakespeare,” “woolf and gender/feminism,” “woolf and intertextuality,” etc.