The Real McCloy: Fiction, History, and the Real in Zoë Wicomb’s “The One That Got Away”

This article examines the intertextual connections between Zoë Wicomb's 2008 short story, "The One That Got Away," and Helen McCloy's 1945 novel, The One That Got Away, a piece of detective fiction used by Wicomb's main character as the basis for a work of contemporary art. Drawing concepts from Wicomb's 2005 essay on setting and intertextuality, I argue that Wicomb creatively interacts with McCloy's novel to explore issues of authorial ethics, historical representation, and ideological critique. At the heart of both works is a series of triangular relationships between readers, texts, and their corporeal authors that foreground acts of resistant reading and creative reframing. Familiarity with McCloy's novel reveals new forms of reference and commentary at work in Wicomb's story

\u27Your pen, your ink\u27: Coetzee\u27s Foe, Robinson Crusoe, and the Politics of Parody

Your pen, your ink, I know, but somehow the pen becomes mine while I write with it. as though growing out of my hand.1 J. M. Coetzee\u27s 1986 novel, Foe, presents itself as a \u27source\u27 or earlier version of Defoe\u27s Robinson Crusoe. Its fictional premise, which places Susan Barton on the same island Crusoe and Friday inhabited, uses names and other recognizable details from Defoe to signal the complex literary relationship between the two novels.2 Foe is a parody of Robinson Crusoe in the sense in which Linda Hutcheon defines parody as \u27imitation characterized by ironic inversion\u27, or \u27repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity\u27. 3 By including \u27critical distance\u27 in the very definition of parody, Hutcheon shows that she views all parodies as in some sense critical of their source texts, although in practice there is a great range to the amounts and types of criticism suggested by different parodic texts. Whether a given parody is socially or politically subversive, however

Classical texts in post-colonial literatures: consolation, redress and new beginnings in the work of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney

This article examines the ambivalent relationships between classical texts and post-colonial literatures in English, with special reference to the work of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. It is argued that analysis of the formal, discursive and contextual relationships between ancient and modern in poetry and drama reveals significant correspondences as well as important differences between the literary and political role of the Classical Tradition in Caribbean and Irish writing. These can be revealed and explained by the writers' balance between ideas of consolation, redress and new beginnings. This in turn opens the way to re-assessment of some of the models of appropriation, creativity and dialogue which have been used in recent research into both Reception Studies and Post-Colonial Literatures