Subversive Intertextuality in Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl

Dana E. Lawrence unveils the ways Helen Oyeyemi employs adaptation and allusion to locate herself and her work within the intersections of British literature, women's literature, Nigerian literature, and Yoruba folk traditions. Lawrence argues that in addition to its place within diasporic literature, The Icarus Girl (2005) belongs in larger conversations about adaptation and intertextuality, women’s writing, and Gothic literature. Despite the prevalence and specificity of intertextual references in Oyeyemi’s first novel, scholars have not yet examined the significance of its literary influences beyond a few brief mentions of the many allusions to British, American, and Nigerian literature and European and Yoruba mythologies contained within the work. However, none of these studies have engaged in a true comparative analysis that situates Oyeyemi’s novel within the various literary traditions that influence its narrative.Subversive Intertextuality in Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl seeks to remedy gaps in existing scholarship by putting The Icarus Girl in direct conversation with foundational 19th-century works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, alongside Nigerian canonical texts like Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forest. This comparative analysis reveals Oyeyemi’s deeper engagement with 19th-century women writers, Gothic literature, and postcolonial literary traditions. Lawrence shows that The Icarus Girl examines the use of adaptation, appropriation, intertextuality, and allusion as rhetorical modes of resistance as it simultaneously admires and talks back to Western and Nigerian canonical texts.