Variations: Influence intertextuality, and Milan Kundera, Jean Rhys, and Tom Stoppard

This thesis is in three chapters. Chapter one is about Harold Bloom's theory of the Anxiety of Influence. Bloom's argument is that literary history is shaped by the anxiety of "strong" poets at their belatedness. I show that he depends upon a subjective interpretation of literary production in order to defend a rigidly traditional canon.;Chapter two deals with theories of intertextuality, principally those of Julia Kristeva and Michael Riffaterre. As alternatives to theories of influence, neither proves satisfactory. Both founder on the contradictory goal to explain all literature, at the expense of recognizing literary diversity.;Chapter three concerns literary variations. These are texts which are deliberately premised on pre-existing texts. I focus on three examples from this class of literary texts which is not satisfactorily dealt with by any of the theories I consider. I pursue a less wide-ranging approach in order to unearth important features of literary variations.