Contents§§Acknowledgements 9§§Introduction 11§§1. Literary Spinoffs: An Intertextual Genre 30§§1.1.Spinoff Aesthetics: Explicitness and Intensity of the Intertextual Relation 32§§1.2Oscillation and Good Continuation 36§§1.30-2: Text and Context/Text and Matrixes 41§§1.4The 'Dialogic' Involvement with the Pre-Text:§§Dark Areas and In-/Compatibility of Fictional Worlds 44§§1.5Spinoffs as Communicative Genre: Dialogue and Dialogics 48§§1.6Intertextual Contexts 50§§2.Re-Visioning Intertextuality: Models and Debates 61§§2.1Predecessors: Poststructuralist vs. Descriptive Intertextuality 62§§2.2Alternative Positions 73§§2.3A Working Model of Intertextuality in Cultural and Literary Analysis 78§§3.Cultural Work and the Functions of Genre 97§§3.1Cultural Work 99§§3.2Exclusion and Inclusion: Spinoffs and/as Participatory Culture 102§§3.3The Literary Marketplace and Cultural Capital 107§§3.4Copyrights and Copywrongs: Who 'Owns' Culture? 111§§3.5Revisiting the Nineteenth Century 116§§4.Ahab's Wife: A Cannibal of a Book? 125§§Ow(n)ing Melville 125§§4.1Appropriating Melville 131§§Swimming through Libraries, Weaving the Web: Levels and Methods of Intertextual Engagement in Ahab's Wife 134§§Whose Melville? 142§§4.2The World as Ship: Mad Hunts, Male Myths 150§§Melville's Male Microcosm 150§§Moby-Dick as Quest Narrative: Ahab's Quest156§§Male Quests Reconsidered164§§Re-Considering the World of Male Bonding175§§4.3Re-Writing the Quest: From Soaring Spirit to Social Vision 180§§Invading the World of the Ship, Questioning Separate Spheres182§§Diving and Soaring187§§Una's (In-)Sights: Freedom and Community196§§Reading Melville through Discourses of Slavery203§§(Mis-)Guided Missions-Commenting on National Quests 208§§4.4The Quill and the Quilt: Art as Social Vision 211§§The Quilt and the Quill: Sewing and Writing as Means of Coping 212§§The Life of Art: Creating a Community of Texts222§§5.From Playing Pilgrim to Waging War: March 229§§The Return of the Father229§§5.1Little Women: Alcott's Classic? 233§§'Moral Pap for the Young' vs. Female Myth 233§§Little Women's Intertexts 237§§5.2Little Women and Colossal Fathers: March's Pre-Texts 245§§Re-Writing Little Women 245§§Literary Intertexts 248§§History and Biography as Intertexts 253§§5.3March's Civil Wars: Gender, Soul-Wrestling, Slavery, and Innocence 259§§The Missing Father as Husband: Sex Wars 261§§The Father as Pilgrim: A Transcendentalist's Civil 'Wars'270§§Re-Viewing the National Founding Story, Re-Imagining the Civil War278§§The End of Innocence: March's National Bequests288§§A Trunk Full of Books300§§6.American Pastorals? Re-Reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 304§§6.1Twain's Fame: The Hypercanonization of Mark Twain§§and Huckleberry Finn 304§§6.2Reading Huckleberry Finn: Hermeneutic Agendas 311§§Hannibal Nostalgia: Imagined Childhoods and Pasts314§§The Mississippi as Alternative Space: Freedom and Civilization 322§§Race in Huckleberry Finn: Voice, Plot, and Characterization 328§§6.3My Jim: Huckleberry Finn as Neo-Slave Narrative 338§§In the Margins of Twain's World: Turning Huckleberry Finn into a Narrative of Slavery 340§§Re-Dressing Jim: From Minstrel Mask to White Man's Hat 359§§Mississippi Myths 367§§Connections372§§6.4The Bequests of the Fathers: Fatherhood, Inheritances, and the Role of the Past in Finn 385§§Rewriting Pap Finn: Intertextual Strategies in Finn 389§§Fatherly Bequests and River Nightmares: Finn and the Nature/Civilization Divide 394§§Huck's Blackness405§§Whence, America? National Origins and Narrative Voice 410§§The Writings on the Whitewashed Wall 415§§In Search of Narrative Alternatives 421§§Conclusion: Story-Telling, Libraries, Trunks of Books, and the Writing on the Whitewashed Wall 429§§Bibliography 452§§List of Illustrations 492§§Index494§