摘要：

Rewriting canonical works has become so extraordinarily widespread in recent literary productions that appropriation has come to be seen as a leading novelistic genre today. Reinterpretations of canonical texts by means of rewriting reflect the changing social and political circumstances, the interaction between past and present modes of fictional representation as well as the evolution of text comprehension. The article deals with a particular type of rewriting characteristic of contemporary novelistic discourse - that of recontextualisation which uses the categories of time and space as objects of substitution, thus placing the original plot in unexpected frames. The article seeks to account for the proliferation of texts created by means of recontextualisation in contemporary fiction and concentrates on their interpretive (hermeneutic) function, which is double-edged: on the one hand, filling in the lacunae of the original narrative, recontextualisation serves as a strategy of literary exegesis demonstrating shifts in the interpretation of the source text; on the other, by updating the original plot, recontextualisation suggests attitudes towards contemporary experience and provides a commentary on and an interpretation of the social and cultural context in which the rewrite has been produced. The examples of recontextualisation analysed in the article are drawn from contemporary British and American fiction, in particular, Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres" (1991); Marina Warner's "Indigo: Or, Mapping the Waters" (1992) and Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" (1998).

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