A term you'll meet in literary theory.
Intertextuality is the literary-critical term for the idea that no text exists in isolation — every text is shaped by, refers to, responds to, and is read through other texts. The term was coined by the Bulgarian- French theorist Julia Kristeva in 1966 in her essays on Bakhtin, and was elaborated through the work of Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, and the broader post-structuralist tradition. It is one of the most useful concepts in modern literary criticism, but also one of the most loosely used.
Kristeva's foundational essay "Word, Dialogue and Novel" (1966) argued that any text is "a mosaic of quotations" — constructed from absorption and transformation of other texts. She was drawing on Bakhtin's earlier ideas about dialogism (the idea that every utterance is already in conversation with other utterances) and pushing them in a post-structuralist direction.
For Kristeva, intertextuality was not a literary device that some writers chose to use. It was a structural feature of language itself. No text is original in the strong sense; every word in a text carries traces of every previous use of that word. The author is not the autonomous creator of meaning but the assembler of pre-existing materials.
This is the most useful distinction in the area:
An allusion is a deliberate quotation. An intertextual relationship can be unintentional — a writer can echo a predecessor without knowing the predecessor exists. The writer's intention is part of the question for allusion; not necessarily for intertextuality.
The French critic Gérard Genette in Palimpsests (1982) proposed a more systematic vocabulary, distinguishing five kinds of relationship between texts:
Genette's categories are more useful for analytic precision; Kristeva's broader sense is more common in general critical use.
Postmodern literature is sometimes characterised as self-consciously and densely intertextual. Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Italo Calvino, John Barth, Umberto Eco — all build novels whose meaning depends on the reader recognising networks of reference. The postmodern argument: in a media- saturated culture, originality in the Romantic sense is impossible; all writing is recombination of prior writing, and the honest move is to make this visible.
The internet, and especially fan culture, has made intertextual production constant. Fanfiction is sustained intertextual transformation. Memes are intertextual by design. Twitter quote-tweets are intertextual. Reaction-image conventions across platforms produce dense networks of reference. The post-2010 literary novel often contains internet-style intertextual layering as a feature.
The critical complaint against intertextuality as a concept: it has become so broad that everything is intertextual, so it explains nothing. If every text is in relationship with every other text, the term tells us nothing about specific works. The pushback has produced more careful versions of the concept (Genette's typology; Riffaterre's narrower definitions) that try to give the concept analytic edge.
When reading a text, ask which other texts it is in relationship with. Some relationships are explicit (allusion, quotation, parody). Some are structural (genre conventions, narrative patterns). Some are unconscious echoes the writer may not have intended. The deepest reading of any text includes its intertextual web — what it knows, what it answers, what it cannot help drawing on. Reading this way is what serious literary criticism does at its best.
Lexio is a free Chrome extension and web app that reads a word's actual context and tells you what it means in this sentence, not from a generic dictionary.
Try Lexio — free →
Read deeper. Understand everything.
© 2026 Lexio · Privacy · Credits