This collection explores and clarifies two of the most contested ideas in literary theory - influence and intertextuality. The study of influence tends to centre on major authors and canonical works, identifying prior documents as sources or contexts for a given author. Intertextuality, on the other hand, is a concept unconcerned with authors as individuals; it treats all texts as part of a network of discourse that includes culture, history and social practices as well as other literary works. In thirteen essays drawing on the entire spectrum of English and American literary history, this volume considers the relationship between these two terms across the whole range of their usage.

Presents lucid and exemplary critical essays, introducing readers to J. M. Coetzee's works, practices, horizons and relations.

J. Todd Hibbard examines the way in which Isaiah 24-27 reuses earlier texts and traditions as part of its literary strategy. He analyzes those literary connections under the rubric of intertextuality, an idea taken over from modern literary studies. Intertextuality is normally recognized as describing an orientation to one or more texts, but does not define a particular methodology. Moreover, because intertextuality is a term that is used in biblical studies in a variety of ways, the first part of this work seeks to define a methodology based on an intertextual approach that is useful for studying prophetic texts. This methodology attempts to understand the ways in which an ancient author may have appropriated an earlier text in a new composition. It requires that texts share common vocabulary and themes, be chronologically possible, and exegetically meaningful to be a true intertextual connection. In terms of literary technique, the author recognizes that intertextual connections may be forged through citations, allusions, and echoes. Finally, he considers several possible purposes for such intertextual connections. The major exegetical categories for understanding the intertextual connections noted in Isaiah 24-27 include texts which universalize earlier judgment passages, texts which universalize earlier restoration and salvation passages, and texts which respond to earlier prophetic texts that are considered unfulfilled.

The poetics of intertextuality proposed in this book, based mainly on semiotics, elucidates factors determining the socio-historically elusive border between general intertextuality and citationality, and explores modes of intertextual representation.

No text has its meaning alone; all texts have their meaning in relation to other texts. Since Julia Kristeva coined the term in the 1960s, intertextuality has been a dominant idea within literary and cultural studies leaving none of the traditional ideas about reading or writing undisturbed. Graham Allen's Intertextuality outlines clearly the history and the use of the term in contemporary theory, demonstrating how it has been employed in: structuralism post-structuralism deconstruction postcolonialism Marxism feminism psychoanalytic theory. Incorporating a wealth of illuminating examples from literary and cultural texts, this book offers an invaluable introduction to intertextuality for any students of literature and culture.