Antique lands, new worlds? Comparative literature, intertextuality, translation

When it comes to labelling the re-writing relationship obtaining between postcolonial works of literature and their colonial predecessors, instead of speaking in terms of influence, which would imply a hierarchically construed historical relationship valorising the work in the mother culture over its postcolonial counterpart, we would do better to speak of what I will call bound intertextuality, something that is stricter than a mere referential use of intertextuality, yet looser than what we usually label a translation. Such bound intertextuality may manifest itself on all levels of the work of literature, including the use of genre. In the analytical part of my article, I try to show how Amitav Ghosh's 1992 In an Antique Land intertextually translates Shelley's Ozymandias from a postcolonial perspective.