SOURCE: Burns, Robert Alan. “Crawford, Davin, and Riel: Text and Intertext in Hugh and Ion.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, no. 37 (winter 1995): 62-78.

In the following essay, Burns looks at Crawford's writings in terms of intertextuality and her use of parody of other (primarily male) writers, focusing on Hugh and Ion and “Malcolm's Katie.”

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman has commented recently that intertextuality occurs “when literary texts connect with other literary texts, with nonliterary texts, and with broadly conceived cultural contexts.” Wasserman continues by pointing out that intertextuality “can be conscious, as a text parodies, imitates, or improves on another, or unconscious, as a text … develops in a context that its will or even its keenest analytic faculty cannot touch” (460). Wasserman's remarks provide a helpful framework within which to examine the intertextual character of Isabella Valancy Crawford's texts, which are often consciously parodic, subverting not only the texts...