Subversion:The Hypertextual Reading Of Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping

In light of Gerard Genette’s textual theory,this thesis studies the hypertextual relationship in Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping and can be divided into two parts,the contrasts between Lighthousekeeping and Richard Wagner ’s Tristan and Isolde as well as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.In terms of the former,Winterson condenses Wagner’s work into a seven-page digest and transforms the noble love between Tristan and Isolde to a mundane travesty of Dark and Molly.In her digest,she changes the details to ensure the purity of Tristan’s love and the absolute defeat of reason.As to her travesty,she modifies the lovers’ separation and departure and substitutes the previous physical death with the mental one to alternate the initiative and hand over the power from reason to love.Considering the latter,Winterson utilizes Mann’s novella as a prop and extracts its actions and the relationships to transform Aschenbach’s pursuit of love into Silver’s pursuit of knowledge.She transplants Mann’s juxtaposition of the clash between sense and sensibility as well as the coexistence of reason and insanity in her own story whereas changes the stalking object,method as well as the outcome to satirize the hegemony of reason via Silver’s “crazy” pursuit of knowledge and rejection by civilization itself.Hence the thesis concludes that the subversive hypertext not only displays two dichotomies,namely reason and love as well as reason and madness,but also manifests Winterson’s subversion of reason and the emancipation of love and madness.