Epigonality

Stifter's own commentary implies that the attempt to distance oneself from epigonality, to overcome it—as was the case with Immerman—collapses the novel, and he arrives at a conscious affirmation epigonic methods.

I would suggest that the weighting towards a male-authored tradition in Italy does cause female authors to feel a different kind of inhibition from that generic sense of epigonality associated with the post-modern period.

Above all, two continuously encountered research perspectives stand in the way of an objective and open-ended textual investigation: teleology and, often in conjunction with it, the assumption of epigonality.