ABSTRACT
The author willingly admits to having once or twice stretched history to suit his own fictional ends.
Up ‘until this point we have been discussing adaptation and appropriation within the intertextual framework of texts adopting and adapting other texts. In the next and final chapter, following Kristeva’s lead in her writing on intertextuality in Desire in Language (1980), we expand the parameters of that debate to include the companion art forms of painting and music. But there is a further parallel mode of appropriation that uses as its raw material not literary or artistic matter but the ‘real’ matter of facts, of historical events and personalities. What happens, then, to the appropriation process when what is being ‘taken over’ for fictional purpose really exists or existed?
