The open book

"The Open Book is a provocative study of literary influence and intertextual relations which brings considerable light to the textual and personal negotiations among five major writers: Leslie Stephen, Thomas Hardy, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, and Virgina Woolf. Jensen reimagines the links between text and context as she endeavors to historicize literary indebtedness by taking Bloomian "anxiety" and Kristevan "intertextuality" into fields of actual history and biography. Jensen both borrows from and deconstructs the ideas of these theorists as she reads them alongside the works of these five writers. The Open Book thus offers a fresh and pragmatic opening onto the relation between personal, cultural, and institutional history on the one hand, and literary history on the other."--BOOK JACKET.