Intertextual Knowledge and Discourse

Another section of the article “On the Wing” in All the Year Round discusses ideas surrounding gravity, buoyancy, and density in a study of animals, which correlates to ideas of gravity, buoyancy, and density in relation to objects in the weekly installment Chapter XV of The Moonstone. Katie Lanning notes the term “tessellated reading” as a common practice of serial readers, the idea being that readers “actively rearranged the ideas embedded within each periodical to reach a unified meaning from the reading experience” (1). Arguably, this article could be read in such a tessellated manner with The Moonstone installment, as a non-fiction counterpart to supplement the fictional story. Betteredge and Sergeant Cuff use their knowledge of density and weight to conclude that Rosanna hid her case by sinking it either in the water or the quicksand (Collins 129). Betteredge notes that “light or heavy, whatever goes into the Shivering Sand is sucked down, and seen no more” (Collins 130). When read alongside this article, the matter of fact approach to the properties of the Shivering Sands seems an attempt to affirm the seriousness, or, gravity, of the novel, by including Betteredge and Sergeant Cuff’s knowledge of density within the larger scientific discourse outside of the novel.

Works Cited:

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone, Oxford, 2008.

Lanning, Katie. “2011 VanArsdel Prize Essay Tessellating Texts: Reading The Moonstone in All the Year Round.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 45, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41638120. Accessed 01 Dec. 2019.