Intertextual Networks is a three-year research project funded by a generous $290,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, focusing on intertextuality in early women’s writing. Starting in October 2016, the WWP will begin work on this collaborative research initiative, which will examine the citation and quotation practices of the authors represented in Women Writers Online (WWO) to explore and theorize the representation of intertextuality.

For this project, the WWP will assemble a collaborative research team that includes faculty, graduate students, and members of the WWP staff, representing a diverse set of perspectives and expertise. Each member of the collaborative group will pursue a research project engaging with materials from WWO, to be published in Women Writers in Context, the WWP’s open-access publication series. We will also be developing interface tools for exploring intertextual connections and patterns. As part of this work, we will be undertaking a broad encoding of quotations and citations across the entire WWO collection, linking textual references to a comprehensive bibliography of sources, which we will make openly available at the WWO Lab.

We have recruited an initial set of collaborators and we are currently soliciting proposals for additional scholars interested in joining the project. For more details and to submit a proposal, see the call for proposals below. For more information on the work we will be undertaking in this project, please see the full proposal. And, for updates on our progress and discoveries, as well as the work being done by our collaborators, see the WWP’s blog.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The Women Writers Project is seeking collaborators as part of Intertextual Networks: a three-year, National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project, focusing on intertextuality in early women’s writing. We are inviting participation from scholars interested in conducting their own exploration of intertextuality in one or more texts from the Women Writers Online collection. A full list of WWO texts is available.

To apply, please send the following information to WWP@neu.edu by September 30, 2016:

• your name and contact email address
• your institution
• a brief (up to one page) description of your proposed research project
• a 2-page CV

Your project might take many different forms, such as research essays of any length, experiments in text encoding, serial blog posts, or exhibits that combine narrative with images, examples, or visualizations. We welcome additional ideas. The following is a list of some possible topic areas, intended to be inspiring rather than exhaustive:

• the politics of the self-evident: what texts and characters are assumed to be common knowledge?
• circulation and access: references to the ways one gets (or can’t get) texts
• intertextuality and reading as a reflection on character (fictional and non-fictional)
• doubled and layered intertextuality
• self-reference as intertextuality
• projecting oneself into intertextual space: imagining oneself inside a narrative
• parodic intertextuality
• inclusion or quotation of entire texts or large chunks of text
• relationship to one’s textual sources: mastery, subjugation, other possibilities
• performance and reading aloud, staging texts
• education and the formative impact of reading

The WWP’s work under this grant will extend our representation of intertextuality in WWO texts so that quotations, citations, and other forms of intertextual references can be linked to a comprehensive bibliography of sources. We will also be developing interface tools for exploring intertextual connections and patterns. As part of this work, we will be undertaking a broad encoding of quotations and citations across the entire collection. We will also make a deeper exploration of subtler kinds of intertextual reference (such as allusion and parody) in a subset of the collection, to anatomize and unpack the many ways in which the textual space reverberates with echoes and referential gestures. This deeper exploration will be strongly informed by the research of our scholarly collaborators and the particular projects they undertake. For selected projects, we may develop specialized encoding to support visualizations of specific texts. Participants will be asked to contribute at intervals to a shared blog in which our collaborative exploration of intertextuality will be made visible to a wider public. Completed research projects will be published in Women Writers in Context.

Intertextual Networks has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.