“Old Marley Married a Chinese Writer”: Towards an Aesthetics of Confident Intertextuality

Authors

  • Tamara S. Wagner, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v2i2.48

Abstract

In exploring how intertextuality functions in two Christmas tales published in Suchen Christine Lim’s recent collection of short stories, The Lies that Build a Marriage: Stories of the Unsung, Unsaid and Uncelebrated in Singapore (2007), this article aims to reassess recent developments in Singaporean writing that promise to open up an aesthetics of intertextuality. This new aesthetic engagement with literary legacies forms part of an important move away from the increasingly problematic issue of postcolonial self exoticisation. Instead, such self-reflexive fiction critically and often self-ironically dissects the multifarious potential of literary traditions. “Christmas Memories of a Chinese Stepfather†and “Christmas at Singapore Casket†play with an established genre in order to render this interpretative adaptation a vehicle not so much simply of current issues, but of their careful interrogation.

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Author Biography

Tamara S. Wagner, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Tamara S. Wagner obtained her PhD from Cambridge University and is assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is the author of Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel,1740-1890 and Occidentalism in Novels of Malaysia and Singapore, 1819-2004. Wagner’s current projects include a study of financial speculation in Victorian literature and a collection of essays on Victorian antifeminism

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How to Cite

Wagner, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, T. S. (2014). “Old Marley Married a Chinese Writer”: Towards an Aesthetics of Confident Intertextuality. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 2(2), 52–64. https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v2i2.48

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Articles