A Study Of Intertextuality In Gloria Naylor’s The Women Of Brewster Place And Bailey’s Cafe

Gloria Naylor is a renowned contemporary black female writer in the United States.Her debut novel,The Women of Brewster Place(1982),won a National Book Award.Naylor advanced her narrative skills and meaning expression in her later work of the same theme,Bailey’s Cafe(1992).As the first and last novels of Naylor’s quartet of female novels,the two works constitute an intertextual relationship to a large extent.This thesis mainly discusses the multi-dimensional intertextual connection between Naylor’s first novel The Women of Brewster Place and the fourth black female novel,Bailey’s Cafe published one decade later,with the help of Kristeva’s broad-sense intertextuality and narrow-sense intertextuality put forward by Genette.Specifically,first of all,it mainly analyzes the paratextuality of the two novels,such as the cover content,epigraph and chapter setting.Such designs provide implications to the plots and the author’s intentions.Secondly,the intertextuality in the two works resides in themes,character descriptions,and narrative techniques.Finally,in the other-text intertextuality,the inheritance of traditional African American culture and the reconstruction of the biblical female image show that Naylor is eager to construct a pluralistic discourse system and establish the diversity of African-American women.By examining the intertextuality in the two works,this thesis finds that in her creation of the post-text,Naylor repeats the theme,characterization and narrative techniques of the pretext.In this process,Naylor achieves the skillful creation of novels for black women.Meanwhile,Naylor has realized the subversion and improvement of the pretext during the repetition.Such constant repetition reflects her high attention to and emphasis on the plight of black women,while the subversion and improvement has made it possible for Naylor to optimize the overall control of her works.This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the characteristics of Naylor’s novel creation,and appreciates her persistence in black women’s literature and expectations for a better future for black women.