The idea that texts are produced and readers make sense of them only in relation to
the already embedded codes which dwell in texts and readers (and in authors too, since
they are readers of texts before they are authors), has ramifications which challenge any
claim to textual originality or discrete readings. In this sense, then, all texts and all
readings are intertextual. This brings us close to Genette’s use of the term
‘transtextuality’ (1979:85–90), by which he is referring to everything that influences a
text either explicitly or implicitly.
This dynamic model of intertextuality has peculiar implications for an intertextuality of
children’s literature because the writer/reader axis is uniquely positioned in an
imbalanced power relationship. Adults write for each other, but it is not usual for
children to write literature for each other. This makes children the powerless recipients
of what adults choose to write for them and, de facto, children’s literature an intertextual
sub-genre of adult literature. The writer/ reader relationship is also asymmetric because
children’s intersubjective knowledge cannot be assured. A theory of intertextuality of
children’s literature is, therefore, unusually preoccupied with questions about what a
piece of writing (for children) presupposes. What does it assume, what must it assume to
take on significance? (See Culler 1981:101–102.) For these reasons the interrelationship
between the components of intertextuality, of writer/text/reader—text/reader/ context,
are quite special when we are addressing a theory of intertextuality of children’s
literature.
By now it should be clear that the theory of intertextuality is a dynamic located in
theories of writing, reader-response theory and the production of meaning, and
intersubjectivity (the ‘I’ who, is reading is a network of citations). It is also a theory of
language inasmuch as Bakhtin had identified the word as the smallest textual link
between the text and the world, and because the reading subject, the text and the world
are not only situated in language, they are also constructed by it. So, not only do we
have a notion of all texts being intertextual, they become so because they are
dialectically related to, and are themselves the products of, linguistic, cultural and
literary practices; and so too are readers and writers.
Culler (1975:139), has described the urge towards integrating one discourse with
another, or several others, as a process of vraisemblance. It is the basis of
intertextuality. Through this process of vraisemblance we are able to identify, for
example, the set of literary norms and the salient features of a work by which to locate
genre, and also to anticipate what we might expect to find in fictional worlds. Through
vraisemblance the child reader has unconsciously to learn that the fictional worlds in
literature are representations and constructions which refer to other texts that have
been normalised, that is: those texts that have been absorbed into the culture and are
now regarded as ‘natural’.
At the level of literary texts (the intertext) it is possible to identify three main
categories of intertextuality: (1) texts of quotation: those texts which quote or allude to
other literary or non-literary works; (2) texts of imitation: texts which seek to
paraphrase, ‘translate’ and supplant the original and to liberate their readers from an
over-invested admiration in great writers of the past, and which often function as the
pre-text of the original for later readers (Worton and Still 1990:7); and (3) genre texts:
those texts where identifiable, shared, clusters of codes and literary conventions
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