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During the first decade of his career, Pushkin often represented poetic composition as a matter of craft and imitation rather than visionary inspiration. By addressing other writers, including prominent figures with whom he discussed the meaning of a poetic career, and by means of imaginary conversations with dead poets in which he debunked predecessors while imitating them, Pushkin subsumed numerous voices in his work. The result is that at times Pushkin cultivated an anonymous lyric, and intermittently wrote his poetic persona out of the centre of his creative text. The chapter addresses questions about Pushkin's view of originality and poetic identity. It argues that he read his predecessors with a sense of superiority free from anxiety about literary influence and informed by aspiration.

This chapter examines the influence of Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) on the literary writings of William Shakespeare. Ovid's inspiration of Shakespeare was first recognized in 1598 when Francis Meres undertook an exercise in the art of simile titled ‘A comparative Discourse of the English Poets with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets’. In addition to the similarity of methods of composition observed by Meres, there are also other obvious points of similarity between the works of Ovid and Shakespeare. These include their rewriting of inherited stories into a completely new one and their refusal to submit to the decorum of genre.

This chapter extends the theorisation of literary influence beyond arguments put forward by Harold Bloom (around anxiety) and Bonnie Kime Scott (around modernist coteries) by asserting that it is blind to temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries. It argues that revisiting influence as a driver of literary creativity is critical as literary theory seeks once again to situate texts and think about the author. Katherine Mansfield is an apposite study for influence in a variety of registers - including ambivalence, exchange, identification, imitation, enchantment and legacy - because of her rich engagement with her literary predecessors and contemporaries, and the degree to which she impacted inheritors across time and place.

This chapter presents an interview with Gabriel García Márquez, who talks about his literary influences, including William Faulkner. García Márquez cites Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis as the fundamental influence on his writing. A decisive influence on him, according to García Márquez, is Oedipus Rex. He also discusses Faulkner's influence on him, claiming that they share similar experiences. In particular, García Márquez reveals that Faulkner's whole world—the world of the South which he writes about—was very like his world, that it was created by the same people. He also cites the fact that Faulkner is in a way a Latin American writer whose world is that of the Gulf of Mexico.

This chapter examines the absent presence of Katherine Mansfield in Elizabeth Bowen’s personal and fictional writing to demonstrate how loss, desire and mourning might constitute a particularly female mode of literary influence. It explores Bowen’s ambivalent perceptions of Mansfield as a literary influence throughout her career, on the one hand protesting against her influence and defending her own originality, and on the other recognising her innovation and mourning her as a ‘lost contemporary’. Gildersleeve argues that the literary relationship between Bowen and Mansfield eludes both the Bloomian model of destroying the predecessor and the model of matrilineal heritage preferred by feminist literary critics. Instead, influence between Mansfield and Bowen registers as a ‘desire for kinship, and resentment that this bond does not exist’.

This chapter traces the lodestar role that Katherine Mansfield played for the Australian literary critic Nettie Palmer. Palmer’s literary archive reveals her enchantment with Mansfield as a reader, writer and literary journalist, highlighting the impact of Mansfield’s posthumously published personal writing on her. Mansfield’s presence in Palmer’s archive exposes a thread of literary influence between literary critics and, through Palmer, to an even wider network of literary correspondents. In Palmer’s reviews, letters and notebooks Mansfield alters, chameleon-like, to fit her purpose: the successful colonial writer in exile, the mourned absent contemporary and the incisive literary critic who prompts Palmer to reflect on her own professional writing.

This chapter examines the changes effected in the Spanish translation of Double Falsehood (1987, repr. 2007) by its translator Charles David Ley. On the one hand, Ley replaced the Theobald title with that of Historia de Cardenio (by Shakespeare and Fletcher) and went back to Cervantes for the original names of the characters. On the other, he questioned some aspects of Theobald’s text and altered some passages in his rendering, mainly in the form of substitution and suppression of Theobald’s supposed additions to the lost original. All these textual changes — which are compared with those made by Gary Taylor in his reconstruction of The History of Cardenio — suggest how Ley’s personal interest in, and empathy with, the lost play led him to attempt to recover it, however minimally.

This chapter looks at various gypsy poems by John Clare as exemplary of the way in which the social and economic pressures outlined in Chapter 1 impact upon literary representations of gypsies, pointing out how Clare’s depictions suggest a shift in attitudes towards gypsies across the early decades of the nineteenth century. Comparing one of Clare’s poems with its source text (a poem by Samuel Rogers), the chapter also considers the idea of influence, and the origins of writers' ideas about gypsies, pointing out the clash between literary knowledge and “real” knowledge in Clare’s work. It also demonstrates the way in which gypsies reciprocally provide a particularly appropriate subject for those of Clare’s poems which engage with questions of tradition, authority, and change.

Chapter 3 further examines Dwivedi’s visually oriented strategies to establish literary authority amidst resistance, especially from critics who publicly decried his brand of poetry as crude, and from poets who continued to publish in Braj Bhasha. Dwivedi’s response was pragmatic: he attempted to bring sophistication to Khari Boli poetry through a cultivated association with art; and he modelled poetry that adhered to a modified agenda. He authored and commissioned a series of image-poems, poetry inspired by and published alongside paintings by Ravi Varma (1848–1906) as well as other contemporary artists. Dwivedi’s limited use and sanction of Braj Bhasha’s linguistic and literary influence in these image-poems did not match his agenda in cartoons and prose. Such maneuvers defined the very substance of modern Hindi poetry in the early twentieth century and established Khari Boli as the language of modern Hindi literature.

This chapter offers the first account of Katherine Mansfield's literary connections to Evelyn Waugh. It exposes the satiric potential of literary influence through a consideration of Waugh's schoolboy paper ‘The Twilight of Language’ (1921). Milthorpe describes satire as ‘a mode of writing by necessity alive to outside in influence’ and notes the significant intertextual parallels of narrative, theme and technique between Mansfield's ‘Bliss’ (1918) and Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934), making the case that Waugh’s response to modernism should be interpreted not as rejection, but instead as ‘a destructive misreading that generates a parodic likeness’.

This chapter explores literary influence and the idea that literature can and perhaps even must be read as an evolving system with certain inherent rules. Attempts to demonstrate literary imitation, intertextuality, and influence have relied almost entirely upon close reading. To chart influence empirically, we need to go beyond the individual cases and look to the aggregate. Information cascades theory provides an attractive framework for modeling literary influence and intertextuality at scale. This chapter discusses the results of the author's thematic-stylistic analyses of nineteenth-century novels using Gephi software to identify signs of historical change from one book to the next. The data reveal that the corpus appears to behave in an evolutionary manner. At the macro scale, we see evidence that theme and style are influenced by time and author gender. The findings suggest that a writer's creativity is tempered and influenced by the past and the present, by literary “parents,” and by a larger literary ecosystem.

This chapter traces literary influence Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim, writers who were artistic contemporaries, cousins and friends. It explores the relationship between kinship and literary influence: Elizabeth von Arnim was an early influence on Mansfield, prompted by their close family ties, and von Arnim’s Elizabeth novels clearly influenced Mansfield's In a German Pension (1911). Yet family identification can also threaten personal relationships, particularly when one writer enjoys more success than the other due to the adoption of different artistic ideologies and practices. Familial rivalry can itself, however, work as inspiration, revealed in the correspondence between Mansfield and von Arnim.

We often think of literary canons as representing the hegemony of the past over the present. The introduction asks us to think instead of the way the present reshapes the past to serve its needs. The literary past, in other words, becomes a set of tools for producing new work and thought in the present. Rather than see the literature of the past as a means for us today to critique its historical context, we can see older works as providing a whole host of later readers with modes of engaging with political questions in their own times. Modernist authors, in this view, cultivate forms of commitment and belief rather than critique and skepticism. Modernist literary innovation teaches us, in other words, not the hermeneutics of suspicion but its alternatives.