ABSTRACT
It has become abundantly clear in the discussion of adaptation and appropriation in this volume that these processes are frequently, if not inevitably, political acts. While the action of reinterpretation in a new context was viewed by T. S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ as a necessary, indeed highly valuable, aspect of literary creation, he was ostensibly discussing a form of relationship between intertexts that mirrored his own cultural bricolage of quotation and allusion in poems such as ‘The Waste Land’. That 1922 poem refers, among copious other texts and influences, to John Webster’s The White Devil, William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Henry James, and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire.
