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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Marco MedugnoORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).
This article aims to explore the complex network of intra-textual and intertextual references to Dante's The Divine Comedy in Nuruddin Farah's novel Links (2005). By analyzing the quotations from the poem, this essay wishes to show how the Comedy informs the novel at various levels, from the paratext (since Dante's tercets from Inferno are chosen as an epigraph) to the text itself (since Inferno appears to be deeply constitutive of Links). The analysis then suggests that, on the one hand, Farah employs Dante's poem to address, represent and understand the civil-war context of Somalia from the protagonist's point of view. On the other, he subverts and re-contextualizes Inferno to create new meanings and to distance his novel from Dante's literary antecedent. Therefore, by analyzing the practices of intertextuality between the two texts, this essay aims to investigate both the converging and conflicting strategies enabled in the novel.
Author(s): Medugno M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Tydskrif vir Letterkunde
Year: 2020
Volume: 5
Issue: 1
Pages: 45-55
Online publication date: 21/04/2020
Acceptance date: 04/07/2019
Date deposited: 10/01/2024
ISSN (print): 0041-476X
ISSN (electronic): 2309-9070
Publisher: Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Association
URL: https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.57i1.8060
DOI: 10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.57i1.8060
