The Open Book: Creative Misreading in the Works of Selected Modern Writers

The Open Book is a provocative study of literary influence at work in English writing from Hardy to Woolf. Jensen reimagines the links between text and context as she endeavors to historicize literary influence, 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 the texts of Hardy, Stephen, Woolf, Mansfield, and Middleton Murry. By doing so, The Open Book 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.