Titre
Othello and Steve Richard: An Intertextual Reading of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club
Domaine
Langues
Auteur.e.s
SILUE Nannougou
SILUE Ténéna Mamadou, TUO Wandja Fatoumata.
Résumé
The link between Shakespeare’s Othello and Jonathan Coe’s Steve Richard is consistently addressed through
The Rotters’ Club. Through an intertextual approach, this paper investigates the racial discourse in both the
characters Othello and Steve Richard. Drawing on the theory of intertextuality and Gérard Genette’s concept of
palimpsest that stipulate that texts draw from preceding texts, the paper seeks to demonstrate that Othello, a
typical Shakespearean black protagonist is emulated by Steve Richard in Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club. In
this sense, the study will first examine Othello’s traits potentially reproduced by Steve Richard in the Age of
Thatcherism. To this end, the article explores the relationship between the play Othello and Thatcherism as
politics about black people in Thatcher’s Britain.
Keywords: Othello, Steve Richard, Intertext, Race, Black, Racism, Thatcherism
Numéro
1 (09 - 2025)
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/akiri.v3i3.3
