Intertextuality and Figuration: Toni Morrison with Virginia Woolf, Wole Soyinka, Jackie Kay and Akwaeke Emezi

Intertextuality and Figuration offers a theory and practice of intertextuality that revolves around figuration, the process of making and remaking figures.Drawing on close readings of key texts, including Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, Toni Morrison's Sula, Beloved, Jazz and Love, Jackie Kay's Trumpet and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater, Pelagia Goulimari examines how five major authors engage in complex dialogues that challenge conventional understandings of literary influence and genealogy, creating a web of literary relationships that resists hierarchical ancestor-descendant models in favour of horizontal, rhizomatic connections.Goulimari demonstrates through precise textual analysis how these five writers and their figural practices redefine core concepts of text and intertextuality, moving beyond the familiar Bakhtin, Kristeva and Barthes narratives to encompass more diverse genealogies. In Part One, Goulimari reveals how Toni Morrison is