Every book-length fiction in the Barth canon features writing about writing and tales within tales, and several employ time travel across the fiction/history barrier, a device Barth uses more thoroughgoingly in recent works. Of course, every writer repeats broad themes, certain character types, and basic plot patterns. Barth is unusually fond, though, of recycling not merely general features of his works, but details and devices of every kind.

The corpse of J. A. Paisley made its first appearance in Barth's LETTERS (1979). Frank Talbott's Sex Education play, whose protagonist is an ovum, is a companion piece of and a feminist reply to Barth's "Night-Sea Journey" in Lost in the Funhouse (1968), where a sperm cell is the narrator and protagonist.

But the Barth book The Tidewater Tales has the strongest connection to is Sabbatical. Indeed, some critics have said that in these books Barth has finally returned...