Intertextuality Of "quicksand" And "transboundary"

Quicksand and Passing are consecutively written by Africa-American woman writer Nella Larsen during the Harlem Renaissance. The two novels tell women mulattoes’ suffering experiences of seeking for their identities and belongings against the oppression of classism, racism and sexism. By adopting the theory of intertextuality, this thesis attempts to make a creative interpretation for Larson’s novels. In detail, it studies their internal intertextuality relations for these two novels from the perspective of intertextuality reading. Firstly, this thesis discusses the themes and plots interpreted repeatedly in the two novels and the same writing techniques employed in them. Secondly, the thesis addresses that Passing is an unconscious rewritten version of Quicksand, which enriches and deepens the textual meanings of the former according to the theory of intertextuality. The two characters, who "pass" both from the black to the white and at last return to the black, exhibit mulattoes’ misfortune and complex emotions about two kind of cultures. Finallly, this thesis adresses the reference to highlight the intertextuality between the literary world and the outer world. It reveals the ambivalent psychology of mulattoes and their unreversable destinies in reality. The above studies lead to the conclusion that the process of mulattoes’s geographical passing to psychological passing reveals the mulattoes’revolt against dilemma of identity and survival.