Dictionary

palimpsestuous en · ADJ

Etymology

From palimpsest + -ous by surface analysis, but also a humorous blend of palimpsest (“a text with several layers”) + incestuous (“involving relationships between related things”). Coined by Anthony Burgess (as palimpcestuous, with a suggested alternative form palincestuous to make the connection with incestuous clearer) to describe self-reference and the use of wordplay in the works of James Joyce.

Meanings

1. Pertaining to the textual relationality of a palimpsest; referential to earlier works or self-referential between several meanings of a single text.
   • Nonetheless, Tuyen combines the planned part of her artwork, the book of longings, with found objects and parts of previous projects, which again makes the artwork resemble a more palimpsestuous structure. 2021 April 20, Lena Mattheis, Translocality in Contemporary City Novels, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 68:
   • In a palimpsestuous reading, the hypertext, or the original, always stands to gain by having its hypertextual status perceived. 2001, Christine Olga Kiebuzinska, Intertextual Loops in Modern Drama, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, →ISBN, page 31:
   • All adaptations are palimpsestuous (Hutcheon 2006), and Holmes's “are perhaps the most palimpsestuous of all popular-cultural reworkings" (McCaw 2013:36) 2013, Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko, quoting McCaw, Holmes and the Ripper: Versus Narratives, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 97:
   • What renders these poems valuable in a post-Writing Culture context of contested cultural representation is a peculiar, palimpsestuous quality. 2021, A. Elisabeth Reichel, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives, →ISBN, page 207:
   • But this missive from Boston may be taken as a palimpcestuous précis of Finnegans Wake itself 1965, Anthony Burgess, “ALP and her Letter”, in Re Joyce, page 210:

Forms

Relateds

palimpsestic

wikipedia: Anthony Burgess