Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben -- Introduction / Christian Gutleben and Susana Onega -- Clock-ridden Births: Creative Bastardy in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children / Catherine Pesso-Miquel -- Double Refraction: Rewriting the Canon in Contemporary Scottish Literature / Dietmar Boehnke -- Genre and Islam in Recent Anglophone Romantic Fiction / John A. Stotesbury -- “Dr Jekyll and Mr Jackass”: Fight Club as a Refraction of Hogg’s Justified Sinner and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde / Kirsten Stirling -- Return to Austen: Film Heroines of the Nineties / Celestino Deleyto Alcalá -- Dickens and Post-Victorian Fiction / Georges Letissier -- Parody as Revisionary Critique: Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx / J. Hillis Miller -- Refracting the Past in Praise of the Dead Poets in Possession: A Romance / Margarida Esteves Pereira -- Hearts Object: Jeanette Winterson and the Ethics of Absolutist Romance / Jean-Michel Ganteau -- Between Othello and Equiano: Caryl Phillips’ Subversive Rewritings / Fernando Galván -- Challenging Shakespeare: Strategies of Writing Back in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood / Petra Tournay -- To Hamlet and back with Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones (2001) / Nicole Boireau -- Notes on Contributors / Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben -- Index / Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben.

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Contemporary works of art that remodel the canon not only create complex, hybrid and plural products but also alter our perceptions and understanding of their source texts. This is the dual process, referred to in this volume as “refraction”, that the essays collected here set out to discuss and analyse by focusing on the dialectic rapport between postmodernism and the canon. What is sought in many of the essays is a redefinition of postmodernist art and a re-examination of the canon in the light of contemporary epistemology. Given this dual process, this volume will be of value both to everyone interested in contemporary art—particularly fiction, drama and film—and also to readers whose aim it is to promote a better appreciation of canonical British literature.