An Approach to Transtextuality in Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden: Traces of Victorian Novels, Gothic Fiction, Fairy Tales, and Classical Myths

Abstract

Drawing on Gérard Genette’s inclusive notion of transtextuality—which comprises typologies like intertextuality, metatextuality, and hypertextuality—this article will approach Kate Morton’s novel The Forgotten Garden (2008) as illustrative of different instances of these textual connections. In particular, as an author, Morton has acknowledged that the Victorian novel and Gothic narratives, along with fairy tales and classical myths, have exerted significant influence on her works. Insofar as Morton’s novels display postmodern features as neo-Victorian Gothic textualities, which aim to revisit and portray the past from a contemporary perspective, this article will identify and analyse instances of transtextuality and its different variants in Morton’s novel in relation to the aforementioned four genres in order to prove how the author often resorts to them to create her novels, which become paradigmatic of the notion of transtextuality.