Interpreting Intertextuality in Select Titles of Literary Works in English

It so happens that while giving titles to the literary works, either unconsciously or unconsciously, authors are greatly influenced by certain narrative accounts of the writings of earlier authors; and maybe such authors are impressed by particular episodes or some textual lines of the earlier writings as observed in poetry by Harold Bloom in his The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Some writers feel like giving proverbial titles to their writings too. Here, such events, words and expressions get protracted with different meanings in different contexts and thereby the interpretation of the texts gets rhetorically expanded. This could be one of the natural characteristics of language or more appropriately a creative process used in giving titles of literary texts of the precursor authors. Most often, the episodic echoes and cognitive and socio-cultural constructs make the writers choose titles from earlier writings. This intertextuality follows reconstructionary patterns, references of earlier works, allusions, eponyms or textual borrowings. In this context, a modest attempt has been made in this paper by defining the overarching discourse features of words and phrases of earlier writings in English and American literary writings which are purposefully used as titles obviously noticed in some later writings. They may also be titles with Biblical references; idiomatic titles; titles from well-known authors like William Shakespeare and so on.