Intertextuality in Pratchett’s Novels: Types, Subtypes, Means of Manifestation

Abstract

Abstract. The research is concerned with the comprehensive intertextuality of T. Pratchett's “Discworld” – a cycle of fantasy, representing a multifaceted parody of the fantasy, detective, scientific, mythological, cinematographic, and other texts and genre. The purpose of the paper is to identify various types, subtypes and functions of intertextuality as well as the verbal means of its manifestation in texts under consideration. To achieve the purpose, the study applies the methods of intertextual, textual-interpretational, hyper-textual and stylistic analyses. The main findings are as follows. The Pratchett’s novels encompass all known types of intertextuality: text-text, text-genre, and text – cultural context, including intertextuality references to the literary texts, to non-literary texts and discourses as well as to other semiotic systems, such as painting, sculpture, music, films, comics. Intertextuality and its conveying devices perform a set of different functions, including parodic, semantic, stylistic and structural-compositional. The most frequent sources of literary intertextuality in Pratchett’s novels are references to the works of Shakespeare, Tolkien and other writers, as well as to ancient and archaic mythology, primarily ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian and Indian cosmology. Sometimes one allusion creates a special allegorical framework for another, more specific allusion, based on intermedial sources – films, cartoons and different types of art. The identified intertextuality devices include full quotations, paraphrased and humorously reinterpreted idiom-precedent phenomena, precedent names as well as the names of theories, games, computer programs, etc. The revealed markers of intertextuality can be both unchanged and modified, altered. In the wider context of the novels the intertextuality devices sometimes acquire new denotative or connotative meanings. In addition to intertextuality references the paper identified in Pratchett’s Discoworld the means of hypertextuality and architextuality.