Intertextual Layers of Portrait Construction: Woolf and Joyce in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This article investigates the role of intertextuality in the construction of literary portraits in twentieth-century modernist fiction, with a particular focus on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Intertextuality, understood through Julia Kristeva’s definition of text as a “mosaic of quotations” and Roland Barthes’s claim of the “death of the author,” positions the individual portrait not as an isolated description but as a node in a web of cultural and literary references. The study demonstrates how Joyce’s portraits of Stephen Dedalus are shaped by scholastic and mythic allusions, Dante, Shakespeare, Aquinas, while Woolf’s portraits of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith resonate with Miltonic diction, Romantic poetics and Biblical undertones. Through close analysis, the article argues that intertextuality transforms portraiture into a cultural performance that embodies both individuality and collective memory. By situating characters within broader traditions, Joyce and Woolf reveal that modernist portraits are not static images of appearance but dynamic texts of cultural dialogue.