Publisher's Synopsis
This study offers a theory for feminist intertextuality based on strategies at work in rewritings of the Bluebeard fairy tale. The book asserts that feminist intertextuality revises one coercive intertext in particular: that of intertextuality theory itself. Rewritings of the fairy tale accordingly can be seen to privilege either the embedded narrative or the escape from it, subscribing either to monologic or dialogic intertextuality. The work examines the original Bluebeard tale group (Perrault, Grimm, variants); historical and modern Bluebeards; and other writers, including Jane Austen, William Godwin, Margaret Atwood, John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, Gloria Naylor, Emma Cave, Max Frisch, Stephen King, Meira Cook and Donald Barthelme.
