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works usually rework literary traditions, bringing a fresh, original sensibility to American letters. As a result, when this new novel is published, it immediately broadens critics’ exploration of Whitehead’s exquisite writing strategy. 

Not surprisingly, many scholars at home and abroad have studied the author’s unique narrative strategy in this novel. In foreign academic circles, Beverly C. Tomek (2017) examines the overlap between fiction and actual historical accounts, concluding that by combining reality and fantasy, Whitehead reveals black people’s helplessness in the past and present. According to Michel Faith (2018), this novel is more than just neo-slavery style. This novel, in his opinion, draws on both slave narratives, with its linear order and canonical plots, and neo-slave narratives, with their emphasis on the black agency. The Underground Railroad, according to Adam Kelly, reanimates the slave narrative, disturbs conventional view of the past, and stretches the ligaments of history directly into our own day (2018).

Chapter Two Intertexts in The Underground Railroad

2.1  Omnipresence of Historical Intertexts

Julia Kristeva, a famous French literary and feminist critic, synthesized Saussure’s symbolic theory and Bakhtin’s dialogue theory and put forward the word “intertextuality” for the first time in her paper Words, Dialogue and Novel in 1966. She argues that “each word (text) is an inter section of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read” and “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity” (Kristeva, 1986:37). This definition means that each text is a mirror of other texts, and they refer to each other. There are always other words in a word, other texts in a text. Each text is the absorption and transformation of other texts, forming an open network with unlimited potential, thus forming a vast open system of texts in the past, present, and future and the evolution process of literary semiotics. The “other word (text)” here is what we usually call “intertext”, which includes not only literary texts, but also non-literary texts such as the social and historical environment. Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality is a high generalization of the basic features of literary texts and cultural texts (“any text is intertext”), which is typical generalized intertextuality.

Kristeva regards social history as a big text and thinks that literary text is the reading and rewriting of social text (Qin, 2006:19), similar to the new historicism’s connection between literary text and historical context. New historicists regard the historicity of texts and the textuality of histories as their footing of critical practice. They hold that “literature and history are not the relationship between ‘reflect and be reflected,’ or even the relationship between internal and external, but the relationship between circulation, dialogue and communication of various social energies based on intertextuality, which is the relationship between various social and cultural forces shaping each other” (Tao, 2007:133). 

2.2  Abundance of Paratexts

In the 20th century, French literary theorist Gérard Genette further developed Kristeva’s intertextuality. Genette turned his research pers本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。