Theorizing Rewriting through "The Drover's Wife"
This article delves into the practice of rewriting as a literary and cultural phenomenon by using "The Drover's Wife" rewritings as an example. One of the best-known short stories in Australian literature, Henry Lawson's story has inspired or, in some cases, provoked many Australian artists to create their versions of the drover's wife. By tracing the fascinating history of "The Drover's Wife" and the intertextual connections between various reworkings, this article considers how the practice of rewriting transforms a story into a cultural object and the complex phenomenon surrounding it. The article looks at the definition, history, functions and theoretical discussions of rewriting and argues that existing models tend to focus on linear connections between rewritings and their "source texts", which fall short of examining reworkings in "The Drover's Wife", due to the intricate interconnectedness between different versions as well as their political, cultural or ideological interventions. Incorporating previous studies on rewriting with Julie Sanders's "signifying fields'" and John Frow's concept of genre, it provides a new interpretative model to read similar phenomena of rewriting.
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