MODULE A HSC NOTES:

Intertextuality:
The shaping of texts’ meanings by other texts
- The concept of a text as an isolated entity which operates in a self-contained manner
Inter: a prefix from Latin; “between”, “among”, “in the midst of”, “mutually”, “reciprocally”,
“together”, and “during”
Textuality: all of the attributes that distinguish the communicative context under analysis

- The shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. The associations or connections

between one text and other texts
- Intertextual references can be more or less explicit; can be conscious or unwitting
- Intertextuality can include: allusion (reference to another text), quotation, calque,
plagiarism, translation, pastiche (respectful reference to text), parody, and structural
borrowing.

Intertextuality asks us to think about why the author is choosing this particular literary or social
text, how they are including the text in the book, and to what effect is the text reimagined by the
book, or the book shaped by the text.
In a broad sense, intertextuality is the reference to or application of a literary, media, or
social “text” within another literary, media, or social “text”. In literature, intertextuality is when a
book refers to a second book by title, scene, character, or storyline, or when a book refers to a
social “text” such as a media, social, or cultural story. This borrowing invites a comparison
between your understanding of the text outside of the book, and its use inside of the book.
Basically, when writers borrow from previous texts, their work acquires layers of
meaning. In addition, when a text is read in the light of another text, all the assumptions and
effects of the other text give a new meaning and influence the way of interpreting the original
text. It serves as a subtheme, and reminds us of the double narratives in allegories (hidden
meaning).
When factors and concepts from one text are taken out and adapted into another text
and creates a refreshed meaning of the storyline.

Historical context of Pride and Prejudice:

- Though the rural countryside in which Austen's novels are set seems at a far remove
from the tumultuousness of the period, the world of Pride and Prejudice bears the traces
of turmoil abroad. As Gillian Russell writes, "The hum of war time, if not the blast or cry
of battle, pervades fiction." The presence of the troops at Brighton and militia officers like
Wickham reflect wider concerns about the place of the military in English civil society.
- Austen's novels portray the gentry, a broad social class that includes those who owned
land as well as the professional classes who did not.
- At the same time, from 1780 onwards there was a fairly steady rise in the number of new
novels being published, so that by the end of Austen's life, the novel was the dominant
form of literature in England.
- Novels of the kind Austen published would have been an unaffordable luxury for a great
deal of the population.
- Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries marked an explosion in novel
reading and the production of the novels themselves, the widely affordable novel would
not become ubiquitous until the middle of the nineteenth century.
- The realist novel, defined by its putatively objective narrator, psychologically developed
characters, and minute description of the realities of domestic life, was in part
inaugurated by Austen in Pride and Prejudice, and would come to dominate the literary
scene in England throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.
- Although novels were widely read, throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, they were largely considered unserious, frivolous, and even irrelevant-a
merely "Popular" genre.
Key Historical Events:
- 1973 → vietnam war ends & britain enters european common market
- 1976 → britain obtains help from the International Monetary Fund
- 1978 → ‘Winter of discontent’ with strikes and shutdowns all over britain
- 1982 → Britain defeats Argentina in war over the falkland islands
- 1984 → Miners’ strike lasts a year
Key Feminist events:
- 1970 → Working women were refused mortgages in their own rights
- Britain’s first national Women’s Liberation Conference is
held in Ruskin college
- The equal pay act makes it illegal to pay women lower
rates than men for the same work
- ‘Miss World Competition’ interrupted by feminist protestors
claiming the contest is a cattle market
- 1971 → Over 4,000 women take part in the first women’s liberation march
in London
- 1974 → Pressure from women’s movement helps push the National
Health Service (NHS) to make contraception available
- 1975 → the Sex discrimination act makes it illegal to discriminate against
women in work, education, and training
- The employment protection act introduces statutory
maternity provision and makes it illegal to sack a woman
because she is pregnant
- The national abortion campaign is formed in response to
James White’s Abortion Bill
- It organises 20,000 people to create the largest
women’s rights demonstration since the
suffragettes
 - Welsh women drive to Brussels to deliver the first
ever petition to the European Parliament calling for
women’s rights
- 1976 → domestic violence and matrimonial proceedings act introduced to
protect women and children from domestic violence
- 1977 → international women's day formalised as an annual event by the
UN general assembly.
- 1979 → ‘feminist review’ founded, playing a crucial role in promoting
feminist debate in the UK
- Margaret Thatcher becomes britain's first female PM
- 1980 → women can apply for a loan or credit in their own names
- 1981 → Baroness Young becomes the first woman leader of the House of
Lords
- 1983 → Lady Mary Donaldson becomes the first woman Lord Mayor of
London
- 1984 → During the Miners’ strike, wives of picketing miners organised
themselves into a powerful group in every mining village and a working
class women’s movement develops.