In a unique demonstration of the critical possibilities of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and Zola analyzes the intertextual conflicts between four monuments of nineteenth-century fiction: Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Charles Dicken's Bleak House, and Emile Zola's Le Ventre de Paris and Germinal.

The book's fundamental hypothesis is that Dickens and Zola exemplify Hugo's conception of the novel - and of literary history - as a "graft" of one work upon another, producing hybrid mixtures of genres and styles of representation. For Hugo, a new work always "kills" its predecessor while at the same time preserving its memory. Thus writing becomes inlaid with writing; the text, a palimpsest.

Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's book traces the covert manifestations of Hugo's romantic notion of the novel through later French and English realism, arguing that the anachronistic traces of past literary periods are always at work defining the aims of the present, no matter how radical a new departure it seems or tries to be.