ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ‘rewriting’: what the French literary theorist Gérard Genette called hyptertextuality, or ‘writing in the second degree’. Rewriting is broadly conceived to cover many forms and modes of relationships between texts, including adaptation, appropriation, allusion, intertextuality, translation, performance, remix and tradition. This chapter provides examples of rewriting drawn from Classical reception, Biblical reception, fan fiction, and feminist and postcolonial practices of ‘writing back’.
The chapter opens by introducing the idea that meaning is produced between texts, through the intertextual matrix within which texts are created and received. It goes on to explore the notion of rewriting as ‘creative imitation’, arguing that all creative acts are also acts of interpretation as creators perform transformative work on existing material and forms. New texts can thus both critique and illuminate older texts by providing interpretations of those texts from a new perspective.
These intertextual processes create and sustain literary traditions across time, and the chapter goes on to cover key theories of tradition, textual afterlives and literary temporality. Since tradition is both a textual and a social process, the chapter concludes with work on reception beyond the text, including embodied reception practices like immersive medievalism and cosplay.
