“I am the sole author”: inauthenticity and Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s NW
This article examines the role of intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and the novel’s questioning of authorship, authenticity and identity. Relying on intertextual and postcolonial theories, the article lays bare how Smith’s novel questions the fixity and stability of selves and how she situa...
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| Format: | article |
| Publication Date: | 2020 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | TecnoCampus |
| Repository: | Repositori Digital del TecnoCampus |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositori.tecnocampus.cat:20.500.12367/2494 |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12367/2494 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | Intertextuality Authenticity Authorship Postcolonialism Zadie Smith |
| Summary: | This article examines the role of intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and the novel’s questioning of authorship, authenticity and identity. Relying on intertextual and postcolonial theories, the article lays bare how Smith’s novel questions the fixity and stability of selves and how she situates herself as an inherently intertextual author disrupted by others and potentially disruptive of (post)colonial ways of being and one that plays with notions of (in)authenticity and originality. For this purpose, the article pays attention to the novel’s intertextual links with the historical case of the Tichborne claimant and Jorge Luis Borges’s fictionalisation of it in the short story “Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor,” included in the collection A Universal History of Infamy (1933). [...] |
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