Intertextuality in Andrea Levy's novel “Small Island”

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to identify how intertextuality in the novel “Small Island” (2004) by the British writer Andrea Levy (1956–2019) contributes to the representation of postcolonial issues. To solve the research problems, we applied cultural-historical, comparative, biographical methods of literary analysis. The article considers how to appeal to the poem “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth allows the contemporary writer to criticise the anglicised system and the content of education in the colonies, which becomes the conductor of the dominant, Western discourse. The reference to “Gone with the Wind” helps Levy demonstrate how the stereotyping of images of blacks in cultural texts is pointedly acutely perceived by her dark-skinned heroine. An appeal to the poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by the Lord Tennyson and, through it, to Rudyard Kipling's poem “The Last of the Light Brigade”, to the speech of Winston Churchill, serves in “Small Island” to recall the undeservedly, according to Levy, forgotten contribution of the indigenous inhabitants of the colonies to the protection of British territory in World War II and the post-war reconstruction of the country.