Disney adaptations of fairy tales are particularly interesting to an intertextuality of
children’s literature because, as touchstones of popular culture, they reflect the way in
which each generation’s retellings have assumed and foregrounded the dominant socio-
linguistic and cultural codes and values at a particular moment in history: for example
Disney’s foregrounding Snow White’s good looks over qualities of moral rectitude and
goodness claimed for her by earlier, written versions.
But it is not only the stories which change in the repeated intertextual quotations—
the intertextual context of the reading and their reception also changes. For example,
contemporary, feminist, post-Freudian readings of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1866), or Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), make them
different kinds of texts from what was previously possible. Similarly, a contemporary
child reader’s readings of, say, a modern reprint of the original tales of Beatrix Potter
will be quite different from that of its intended readers. In their reading of Jemima
Puddle-Duck (1908), for example, today’s child readers are less likely than child readers
from the earlier part of the century to recognise the ingredients of duck stuffing for what
they are. This is not because, like Jemima, they are simpletons, but because their
stuffing today is more likely to be from a packet. Their probable inability to recognise the
ingredients of duck stuffing removes an opportunity to anticipate Jemima’s fate well in
advance of narration, And, not only do contemporary-child readers have an intertextual
familiarity with Beatrix Potter’s character, Jemima Puddle-Duck and her Potter co-star,
Peter Rabbit, from a proliferation of non-literary artefacts, including video adaptations,
they can also now read about them in series adaptations in Ladybird books (1992).
Ladybird has developed a very powerful position in Britain as a publisher of low-priced,
hardback, formula books—especially retellings of traditional tales—with simplified
language and sentence constructions. They are a good example of the texts of imitation I
described earlier. For some children in Britain they will be the only written version of
traditional tales they have encountered. Comparison between the Ladybird and original
versions of Jemima Puddle-Duck reveals linguistic and syntactic differences that make
assumptions about their respective implied readers; and there are other syntactic,
micro-discursive and linguistic differences which encode different socio-linguistic
climates and—by extension—imply different language-in-use on the parts of their
respective readerships. What we see in operation in these two texts is the tension and
interplay between two idiolects and two sociolects: the uses of language in each text and
their situation in, and reception by their respective sociohistoric contexts and readers.
Each is operating as a textual and intertextual paradigm of its time, but the first-version
text can only be ‘read’ through a network of late-twentieth-century intertexts.
Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising quintet (1966–1977), and Alan Garner’s The Owl
Service (1967), are texts which rely for their fullest reading on a reader’s knowledge of
Arthurian and Celtic myth, especially of the Mabinogion. Together these texts are
examples of the type of two-world fantasy genre where child readers can come to
recognise, and to expect, such generic conventions as character archetype, stereotype
and the archetypal plot structures of quest and journeys. The novels allude only
obliquely to their mythical sources, even though myth is integral to their stories. So,
even in readings that do not rely on knowledge of the myth, readers might intuit the
INTERTEXTUALITY 131