Postmodern Pastiche: The Case of Mrs Osmond by John Banville
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v22i1.3852Keywords:
John Banville, Mrs.Osmond, Pastiche, Parody, Authorial figureAbstract
According to both Genette and Hutcheon, parody is transformational in its relationship to other texts, whereas pastiche is imitative. Other theorists such as Hoesterey and Dyer have redefined pastiche (and imitative textual practices) from the perspective of postmodern aesthetics and explored the way in which it resignifies previous artworks, as it is associated to an awareness of historicity. The aim of this article is to analyse Mrs Osmond (2017) by John Banville as an example of a postmodern pastiche that not only operates by correspondence or tribute in relation to The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James, but also as a novel where recontextualisation does create meaningful differences between the literary works involved. It is in this distance that Banville’s text unsettles traditional notions of pastiche and produces a more polyvalent effect as well as an expansion of the multiplicity already associated to his authorial figure.
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