intertextuality

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a concept in literary theory, introduced by Julia Kristeva drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism, describing the way every text is shaped by and in dialogue with prior texts, such that meaning is produced not within an isolated work but in the web of relations between texts, genres, and discourses; intertextuality encompasses explicit quotation, allusion, parody, pastiche, adaptation, and the more diffuse absorption of prior texts into the fabric of new writing, challenging the romantic notion of the solitary author as sole originator of meaning; in comparative literature the concept is central to understanding how literary traditions influence one another across languages and cultures, how canonical texts are transformed through translation and adaptation, and how writers from marginalised traditions engage, resist, or rewrite the texts of dominant literary cultures; Roland Barthes's declaration of the death of the author and the birth of the reader is closely related, shifting interpretive authority from origin to reception