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Contents


Acknowledgements 9


Introduction 11


1. Literary Spinoffs: An Intertextual Genre 30


1.1. Spinoff Aesthetics: Explicitness and Intensity of the Intertextual Relation 32


1.2 Oscillation and Good Continuation 36


1.3 0-2: Text and Context/Text and Matrixes 41


1.4 The "Dialogic" Involvement with the Pre-Text:


Dark Areas and In-/Compatibility of Fictional Worlds 44


1.5 Spinoffs as Communicative Genre: Dialogue and Dialogics 48


1.6 Intertextual Contexts 50


2. Re-Visioning Intertextuality: Models and Debates 61


2.1 Predecessors: Poststructuralist vs. Descriptive Intertextuality 62


2.2 Alternative Positions 73


2.3 A Working Model of Intertextuality in Cultural and Literary Analysis 78


3. Cultural Work and the Functions of Genre 97


3.1 Cultural Work 99


3.2 Exclusion and Inclusion: Spinoffs and/as Participatory Culture 102


3.3 The Literary Marketplace and Cultural Capital 107


3.4 Copyrights and Copywrongs: Who "Owns" Culture? 111


3.5 Revisiting the Nineteenth Century 116


4. Ahab's Wife: A Cannibal of a Book? 125


Ow(n)ing Melville 125


4.1 Appropriating Melville 131


Swimming through Libraries, Weaving the Web: Levels and Methods of Intertextual Engagement in Ahab's Wife 134


Whose Melville? 142


4.2 The World as Ship: Mad Hunts, Male Myths 150


Melville's Male Microcosm 150


Moby-Dick as Quest Narrative: Ahab's Quest 156


Male Quests Reconsidered 164


Re-Considering the World of Male Bonding 175


4.3 Re-Writing the Quest: From Soaring Spirit to Social Vision 180


Invading the World of the Ship, Questioning Separate Spheres 182


Diving and Soaring 187


Una's (In-)Sights: Freedom and Community 196


Reading Melville through Discourses of Slavery 203


(Mis-)Guided Missions-Commenting on National Quests 208


4.4 The Quill and the Quilt: Art as Social Vision 211


The Quilt and the Quill: Sewing and Writing as Means of Coping 212


The Life of Art: Creating a Community of Texts 222


5. From Playing Pilgrim to Waging War: March 229


The Return of the Father 229


5.1 Little Women: Alcott's Classic? 233


"Moral Pap for the Young" vs. Female Myth 233


Little Women's Intertexts 237


5.2 Little Women and Colossal Fathers: March's Pre-Texts 245


Re-Writing Little Women 245


Literary Intertexts 248


History and Biography as Intertexts 253


5.3 March's Civil Wars: Gender, Soul-Wrestling, Slavery, and Innocence 259


The Missing Father as Husband: Sex Wars 261


The Father as Pilgrim: A Transcendentalist's Civil "Wars" 270


Re-Viewing the National Founding Story, Re-Imagining the Civil War 278


The End of Innocence: March's National Bequests 288


A Trunk Full of Books 300


6. American Pastorals? Re-Reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 304


6.1 Twain's Fame: The Hypercanonization of Mark Twain


and Huckleberry Finn 304


6.2 Reading Huckleberry Finn: Hermeneutic Agendas 311


Hannibal Nostalgia: Imagined Childhoods and Pasts 314


The Mississippi as Alternative Space: Freedom and Civilization 322


Race in Huckleberry Finn: Voice, Plot, and Characterization 328


6.3 My Jim: Huckleberry Finn as Neo-Slave Narrative 338


In the Margins of Twain's World: Turning Huckleberry Finn into a Narrative of Slavery 340


Re-Dressing Jim: From Minstrel Mask to White Man's Hat 359


Mississippi Myths 367


Connections 372


6.4 The Bequests of the Fathers: Fatherhood, Inheritances, and the Role of the Past in Finn 385


Rewriting Pap Finn: Intertextual Strategies in Finn 389


Fatherly Bequests and River Nightmares: Finn and the Nature/Civilization Divide 394


Huck's Blackness 405


Whence, America? National Origins and Narrative Voice 410


The Writings on the Whitewashed Wall 415


In Search of Narrative Alternatives 421


Conclusion: Story-Telling, Libraries, Trunks of Books, and the Writing on the Whitewashed Wall 429


Bibliography 452


List of Illustrations 492


Index 494

Birgit Spengler, PD Dr., ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im Bereich Amerikanistik der Universität Frankfurt am Main.