Reparative, Resentful, Queer, Parasitic: Varieties of Rewriting, 1900–Present

Abstract

My dissertation project asks why contemporary authors continue to reread and adapt classic texts and why modernist authors have come to wield special power as precursors. Rewriting takes many forms: stories may be retold from another character’s perspective, transposed to a new setting, or simply continued from where the author left off. Memoirs and anti-biographies rewrite a canonical author to better suit contemporary sensibilities, while many novelistic rewrites pitch themselves as the text as it "should" have been written. Whether it is to imbue an old story with new political energy or to give marginalized characters a happier ending, rewriting emerges in the 20th century as a paradigm distinct from the models of influence and adaptation. I argue that rewriting must be understood on its own terms and that a more robust taxonomy is needed for theorizing this ever-growing practice, whose origins I trace to British modernism. Despite certain commonalities, rewrites mediate past and present through varied means. They can be simple forms of tribute or avenues for self-help. Their intent is, frequently, "reparative"—to rewrite stories to be more inclusive and just—but just as often "resentful"—bound up with a desire to react against and contradict a predecessor. Very often they are "queer"—unstraightforward, ambiguous, neutral, fraught. And, sometimes, they are "parasitic"—nakedly opportunistic in mining the canon for material and cultural prestige. I take a trans-periodizing approach, tracing how modernism resurfaces and informs contemporary fiction and nonfiction. Through case studies of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster, I show that rewriting, instead of being a strictly postmodern or postcolonial concern, is a useful conceptual framework for understanding modernist literature. Methodological approaches to rewriting are limited. The phenomenon is usually dismissed as the byproduct of a risk-averse publishing industry or seen as a liberal “rescue mission” to recuperate characters who have not been given their due. The useful, but limited, frameworks of postcolonial “writing-back,” postmodern “pastiche,” and feminist “re-vision” do not account, however, for the full range of rewriting. My goal is to taxonomize several varieties of rewriting, argue for its centrality to the modernist period, and account for critiques that have emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century in the work of A. S. Byatt and J. M. Coetzee. Viewing the history of twentieth century literature through the lens of rewriting allows me to retell the story of modernism anew, while establishing why this practice has such a firm hold on literary culture today. My intervention is to show that rewriting is a spectrum, that individual rewrites cannot be praised or vilified according to a single political or aesthetic framework, and that the pivotal moment in its ascendancy is not the 1960s, but the early twentieth century.