| Drawing on postcolonial theorists like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Mary Louise Pratt, and the discussions of intertextuality by Julia Kristeva and Gerard Genette, this dissertation shows how, for certain trans-national authors, hybridity and world-fashioning at once require and allow each other. By adapting the techniques of postcolonial critics to writers in several political situations, this study provides a model of how to read hybridity wherever cultures come into contact.; Dinesen, Nabokov and Rushdie re-invent their worlds to make several cultures overlap. They combine and superimpose one country upon another (Denmark and Kenya; Russia and America; England and India) in search not only for their origins, but for a place where, after a series of transformations, they belong—a place where all of the author's languages are spoken. For each writer, hybrid worlds are the only way to escape the solipsism of nostalgia. Unlike alienated exilic writers such as Conrad or Naipaul, these authors also re-imagine themselves, creating idealized or parodic lives informed by and informing their idealized or parodic worlds. But the results are not always happy: while Isak Dinesen is optimistic in her picture of hybridity in Out of Africa, Vladimir Nabokov's incestuous anti-hero in Ada presents a failed, false hybridity, and Salman Rushdie's hybrid worlds are productive but terrifyingly violent. |
