palimpsestuous
palimpsestuous adjective: pertaining to the textual relationality of a palimpsest; referential to earlier works or self-referential between several meanings of a single text.
Adjective
palimpsestuous (comparative more palimpsestuous, superlative most palimpsestuous)
- Pertaining to the textual relationality of a palimpsest; referential to earlier works or self-referential between several meanings of a single text.
- But this missive from Boston may be taken as a palimpcestuous précis of Finnegans Wake itself1965, Anthony Burgess, “ALP and her Letter”, in Re Joyce, page 210
- 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
Examples of palimpsestuous in a sentence
- 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:
Forms of palimpsestuous
| comparative | more palimpsestuous |
|---|---|
| superlative | most palimpsestuous |
| alternative form | palimpcestuous |
| alternative form | palincestuous |
Origin of palimpsestuous
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.
Questions about palimpsestuous
- What does palimpsestuous mean?
- Palimpsestuous means pertaining to the textual relationality of a palimpsest; referential to earlier works or self-referential between several meanings of a single text.
- How do you use palimpsestuous in a sentence?
- All adaptations are palimpsestuous (Hutcheon 2006), and Holmes's “are perhaps the most palimpsestuous of all popular-cultural reworkings" (McCaw 2013:36)
- What part of speech is palimpsestuous?
- Palimpsestuous is an adjective.
Words near palimpsestuous in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: palimpsestuous (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “palimpsestuous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/palimpsestuous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.