Intertextuality in the short story "The Death of Robert Browning" by Jane Urquhart

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the intertextual dialogue and its meaning that is continuously articulated as cultural heritage in the prose of the well-known Canadian writer Jane Urquhart. By including the famous Victorian poet Robert Browning in the plot of her short story "The Death of Robert Browning," Urquhart highlights the postmodern tendency to express the basic human need to mythologize and perpetuate illusions about death. In a broader context, as an author from Canada, she emphasizes the difference between reality and fiction by revising historical facts through various textual interactions and revisions that help to construct an entirely new literary world freed from the psychological influence of British heritage in the context of Canadian culture. The story "The Death of Robert Browning" demonstrates a literary procedure in which a real person was placed at the center of the plot and his fictional life, which continued less than a hundred years after his death, served to allow readers to experience the real character of a historical figure in a special way. Thus, we get a completely new text in which all the sensibility and syncretism that the poet himself reflected are imprinted, but also a text in which the boundaries between values, rules, and prohibitions disappear and in which the mixture of reality and fiction gives way to the classical vision of the text.