This thesis focuses on intertextuality in four key examples of Michael Roes' fictional travel literature. It places Roes' oeuvre within the wider context of both supposedly factual and avowedly fictional travel writing. I argue that Roes' use of intertextuality is inextricably linked to his vision of a cosmopolitan intercultural encounter and that his work offers alternative perspectives with which contemporary debates about identity can be understood. The four main chapters reveal that each novel acclaims, undermines, or throws new' light on its respective intertexts in different ways. The chapter on his most celebrated novel, Leeres Viertel, explores the links between the anthropological context in which the intercultural encounter is staged and the novel's playful intertextual approach. The second chapter, on Haut des Sudens, argues that Roes' deconstruction of racial identity depends to a considerable degree upon its 'metatextual' (Genette) reliance upon its classic American intertexts (Twain. Faulkner, Melville). In my analysis of Weg nach Timimoun, I read Roes' relocation of The Oresteia to contemporary Algeria as 'demythologizing' intertextuality. indicating a rejection of myth as an universal model. The final chapter, on Geschichte der Freimdschaft explicates the parallels between that novel's narrative of an intercultural friendship and its related intertexts (Montaigne. Foucault. Nietzsche), which provide a new framework for understanding the issue of relationships between men. By interweaving paradigm-changing theories into his novels. Roes impels his readers to rethink and revise perceptions of the world, both with regard to their home culture and to societies further afield. As such he engages with some of the most important and widely-discussed issues in contemporary society: race, sex, gender and international relations in a globalized world.