Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, University of Gdansk, course: British literature, intertextuality, language: English, abstract: Within the full spectrum of various literary theories offered by modern criticism, the theory of intertextuality deserves a particular attention. This ambitious concept, proposed by Julia Kristeva in the 1960's, shed new light on the understanding and approach to a literary text. Influenced by Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, the French scholar suggested a new model of communication which consists of...

The thesis is devoted to the intertextual analysis of The Cement Garden, the first novel of a famous postmodern British novelist Ian McEwan. In the following chapters I shall prove that the novel exhibits both intertextual relations with particular works of fiction and also enters into a discourse with the generic archetypes. The first chapter refers to the intertextual relation 'text-text' and concentrates on the profound interconnectivity between McEwan's The Cement Garden and Golding's Lord of the Flies. The focus is also placed upon depiction of childhood and, in a more general sense,...