The situation is quite different in Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl, which does not partake in the device of the alien but instead casts identity differently. Identity is explicitly regarded as being constructed, hence the invocation of patchwork. Furthermore, the text itself is regarded as a patchwork constructed from a number of texts, all of which are detailed in a bibliography of sorts. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz and a number of theoretical texts all show how this text is deeply intertextual and fully aware of this fact; it is quite deliberate I think that there is a great degree of parallel between the story of the girl and construction of the text. Continue reading →