Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine. “Intertextuality and the Child Reader.

” International
Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. Editor Peter Hunt. Routledge, 2004,
pp. 179-190.1

The term ‘intertextuality’ is now common in literary discourse. It is used most often and most
simply to refer to literary allusions and to direct quotation from literary and non-literary texts.
However, this is only one small part of the theory, which has its origins in the work of Julia
Kristeva (1969) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1973). Since poststructuralist thinking has extended the
idea of the text beyond the boundaries of its being merely a written discourse, the possibilities
for theories and theorisations of intertextuality are now legion. Intertextuality embraces
discourse per se, in its uttered, illustrated, written, mimed or gestured manifestations; it
includes images and moving images, the social and cultural context, subjectivities - which are
the reading/seeing/speaking/writing/painting/thinking subjects - and, indeed, language itself.
Theorists and teachers of literature alike are recognising the place of intertextual
understandings in literary studies for readers’ reception and production of texts, as an adjunct
to reader-response theory. Teachers are engaging with the concept of intertextuality in their
use of literature with young children as a means by which to build up ‘interpretive
communities’ (Fish 1980) among young readers, to give a window on the processes of
meaning-making during a reading, and for engaging in text creation and production (see, for
example, Bloom and Egan-Robertson 1993; Bromley 1996; Cairney 1990, 1992; Lemke
1992; Many and Anderson 1992; Short 1996; Sipe 2000). Intertextual considerations and
understandings are also important in the translation of texts where a source text from one
language and culture is translated for a culturally and linguistically different target audience
(see Desmet 2001; O’Sullivan 1998).

Kristeva (1969: 146) coined the term ‘intertextuality,’ recognising that texts can only have
meaning because they depend on other texts, both written and spoken, and on what she calls
the ‘intersubjective’ knowledge of their interlocutors, by which she meant their total
knowledge - from other books, from language-in-use, and the context and conditions of the
signifying practices which make meanings possible in groups and communities (Kristeva
1974/1984: 59-60). The literary text, then, is just one of the many sites where several
different discourses converge, are absorbed, are transformed and assume a meaning because
they are situated in this circular network of interdependence which is called the intertextual
space.

Kristeva was keen to point out that intertextuality is not simply a process of recognising
sources and influences. She built on the work of Bakhtin, who had identified the word as the
smallest textual unit, situated in relation to three coordinates: of the writer, the text and
exterior texts. For the first time in literary history, the literary text (the word) took on a spatial
dimension when Bakhtin made it a fluid function between the writer/text (on the horizontal
axis) and the text/context (on the vertical axis). This idea replaced the previous, Formalist
notion that the literary text was a fixed point with a fixed meaning. Bakhtin described this
process as a dialogue between several writings, and as the intersection of textual surfaces:
“any text is a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another”
(in Kristeva 1980/1981: 66).

1
I omitted a few paragraphs with additional examples.
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The theory of intertextuality was refined and extended by Jonathan Culler (1981) and by
Roland Barthes (1970/1975), who included the reader as a constituent component of
intertextuality. Culler described intertextuality as the general discursive space in which
meaning is made intelligible and possible (1981: 103), and Barthes invented the term “infinite
intertextuality” to refer to the intertextual codes by which readers make sense of a literary
work, which he calls a “mirage of citations.” They dwell equally in readers and in texts but
the conventions and presuppositions cannot be traced to an original source or sources. “The
‘I’ which approaches the text is already a plurality of other texts, of infinite, or more
precisely, lost codes” (Barthes 1975/1976: 16).

The idea that texts are produced and readers/viewers 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 Gerard 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 and spatial model of intertextuality has peculiar implications for an inter-
textuality 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 phenomenon would effectively make children the
powerless recipients of what adults choose to write for them and children’s literature an
intertextual sub-genre of adult literature. But we now know through the empirical studies
involving young children in the ‘game of intertextuality’ that the intertextual processes
through which children take ownership of a particular text preclude the imperialism of the
text and the author. Inevitably, the phenomenon of intertextuality sets up a curious kind of
hegemony in children’s books, in which adults who write for children consciously or
unconsciously operate in and are influenced by the intertextual space which is the literature
they read as children. That books read in childhood and childhood experiences have a
profound bearing on adult perceptions is borne out by the numerous adults, many of whom
are themselves writers of children’s books, who refer to the influences on them of their
childhood reading matter. […] Nevertheless, and despite children’s demonstrable ability to
take textual ownership through their own intertextual references, the writer/reader
relationship is 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?

For these reasons, the interrelationship between the components of intertextuality, of

writer/text/reader are quite special, when we are addressing a theory of intertextuality of
children’s literature. For example, we might legitimately ask what sense and meanings young
readers make in their readings of Philip Pullman’s award winning His Dark Materials trilogy
which, as Millicent Lenz points out, draws overtly and implicitly on intertextual references to
particle physics and quantum mechanics, on deeply existential questions on the nature of sin
and Fall, and is influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poetry of William Blake and the
complex theory of natural grace in Henrich von Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionette Theatre”
(Hunt and Lenz 2001: 42-82).

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By now it should be clear that the theory of intertextuality is dynamic and dialogic, located in
theories of writing, reader-response theory, the social production of meaning, and
intersubjectivity (the ‘I’ who is reading is a network of citations). It is also a theory of
language because the reading subject, the text and the world are not only situated in language,
they are also constructed by it. Therefore, 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 codes and practices; and so too are readers,
writers, illustrators and viewers.

In the process of making meaning with a particular text, we know that children (and adults,
see Hartman 1995) have recourse to a battery of intertextual phenomena, calling upon, for
example, their knowledge of previously read fictions, visual texts - film, illustration and TV
programmes, texts of popular culture - cartoon, video, comic books, advertisements and
songs (see Many and Anderson 1992; Bloom and Egan-Robertson 1993; Sipe 2000), and that
they do so at many levels of textual engagement such as plot structures, character and
character motivation, language and language patterns, themes and illustrations.

Culler (1975: 139) 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, readers 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 they
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 which quote or allude to other literary or non-literary
works; (2) texts of imitation which seek to parody, pastiche, paraphrase, ‘translate’ or
supplant the original, which seek 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, where identifiable shared clusters of
codes and literary conventions are grouped together in recognisable patterns, which allow
readers to expect and locate them, and to cause them to seek out similar texts. At the level of
literary response, young readers’ intertextual responses might usefully be classified in terms
of the links they make overtly with other texts, their personal experiences which bear upon
their relationship with the focus text, and their inclination to manipulate the focus text in the
pull towards reinvention, recreation, rewriting.

Texts of quotation are probably the simplest level at which child readers can recognise
intertextuality. Examples are Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s The Jolly Postman series
(1986/1997), John Prater’s Once Upon a Time (1993), Jon Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man
(1992) and his The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs (1989), Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes
(1987). All these fictions quote from or allude to a variety of fairy tales. They make explicit
assumptions about their readers’ knowledge of previously read fairy tales: ‘Everyone knows
the story of the Three Little Pigs. Or at least they think they do’ (Scieszka 1989: first
opening), and ‘I guess you think you know this story/You don’t, the real one’s much more
gory’ (Dahl 1987: 5). So, as well as assuming familiarity with an ‘already read’ intertext, the
‘focused texts’ are at the same time foregrounding their own authenticity; that is, they purport
to be more authoritative than the texts they are quoting and are thereby undermining the

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‘truth’ of their pre-texts. They cleverly destabilise the security of their readers by positioning
them ambivalently in relation to (1) what they think they know already about the fairy tales
and (2) the story they are now reading. At the discursive level, then, these particular examples
of texts of quotation are doing much more than simply alluding to other texts; they are
supplanting the pre-texts and challenging their readers’ ‘already read’ notions of the reliable
narrator by an act of referring back which tells the reader that what they knew previously
about these tales was all lies. And The Jolly Postman series is, at the very least, breaking
readers’ ‘already read’ boundary of fictionality by presenting them with a clutch of touchable,
usable, readable written artefacts - letters, postcards, cards, invitations, board games, posters,
etc. - from, to and about characters in fiction, which are facsimile versions of their real- life
counterparts.

Every text of quotation which relocates the so-called primary text in a new cultural and
linguistic context must be by definition a parody and a distortion. All the examples I have
given parody the telling of traditional tales: Once Upon a Time (Prater 1993), ‘Once upon a
time’ (Scieszka 1992: passim), and ‘Once upon a bicycle’ (Ahlberg 1986/1997: first
opening). But the challenge to authority and problems of authenticity for these quotation texts
of fairy tales lies in the fact that the tales themselves are a collage of quotations, each of
which has assumed a spurious ‘first version’ authenticity but for which the ur-text does not
exist, or at least cannot be located. The situation of fairy tales in contemporary culture is
analogous to Barthes’s notion of ‘lost codes.’ The tales are intelligible, because they build on
‘already embedded discourses which happened elsewhere and at another time; they are part
of the sedimented folk memory of discourse and they function now by the simple fact that
other tales like them have already existed. Children’s intertextual experience is peculiarly
achronological, so the question about what sense children make of a given text when the
intertextual experience cannot be assumed, is important.

What happens in readings where such intertextual knowledge cannot be assumed or assured,
such as in cases of cultural transfer or readerly inexperience, where the intertextual references
are unknown and unavailable to the target audience? What sense do children make, can
children make, of a textual encounter in these circumstances? A student teacher explains how
her class of four- and five-year-olds, who were only just beginning to build a foundation
knowledge of books, failed to understand The Jolly Postman because it has quite a difficult
formula with the original story and additional texts as an additional layer to the story in the
form of letters, cards, advertisements, etc. As well as attempting to make sense of the story,
they also needed knowledge of these other genres, familiarity with other fairy stories and
nursery rhymes and perhaps even an understanding of puns, jokes and play on words.

She goes on to describe how one child attempts to take control of the text in his retelling of
the story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’:

When the child reached the part of the tale where the wolf falls into the pot of boiling
water, he explained that the wolf ‘splashed and bashed and kicked his legs’. This was
not in the original text that we had read, but the child had played with what he knew,
had immersed himself in the text and had come up with a playful comment that
expressed an understanding of the story. The children compare and contrast the stories
they are reading with those they already have knowledge of to make up a schema for a
particular genre. It is therefore obvious that the more stories the children know the more
they can understand/interpret richly any given story. (Stapleton 2002)

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[…] 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.

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 (1865), or Burnett’s
The Secret Garden (1911), make them different kinds of texts from what was previously
possible. Similarly, a contemporary child’s readings of a modern reprint of the original tales
of Beatrix Potter will be quite different from those of the readers for whom they were
originally intended. 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
on). 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. […]

Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series (1965-77) and Alan Garner’s The Owl Service
(1984) rely for their fullest reading on the young 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. Thus, even in readings that do not rely on knowledge of the myth,
readers might intuit the echoes of myth as they read and absorb the novels’ more subtle
messages and connections.

Similarly, Robert Cormier’s After the First Death (1979) and Jill Paton Walsh’s novels
Goldengrove (1972) and Unleaving (1976) allude, respectively, to lines from Dylan
Thomas’s poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” (‘After the
first death, there is no other’) and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall” (‘Margaret,
are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?’). In each case, a perfectly coherent reading
of the text is possible without the reader’s knowledge of the intertextual poetic allusions; but
the potential for a metaphoric reading is enhanced by the reader’s previous knowledge of
them. […]

Young readers who come to these novels by Cooper, Garner, Cormier and Paton Walsh with
an explicit knowledge of their intertexts will have a markedly different experience of reading.
They will experience what Barthes has described as the ‘circular memory of reading’
(1975/76: 36). This describes a reading process where the need consciously to recall and to
refer back to specific obligatory intertexts, now being quoted as metaphor and/or metonymy

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in the focused texts, restricts the reader’s opportunity for free intertextual interplay at the
point of reading. The reading experience in such cases moves away from a textually focused
reading that is a more usual kind of narrative engagement to one that is simultaneously
centrifugal and centripetal as the reader seeks to refer to the ‘borrowing’ and at the same time
to integrate it into a new context. It is the essence of this kind of reading to deny readers an
opportunity for linear reading as they move in and out of the text to make connections
between it and the intertext(s). […]

Robert Westall’s novel Gulf (1992), embedded in the 1991 Gulf War, assumes a shared,
contemporary, intertextual experience. However, the detail of the geography and history of
Iraq is an intertextual experience that cannot be assured, thus the narrative deals with it by
way of explanation. This is an example of the way in which texts written for children
sometimes have a felt need to be overreferential; the need to fill intertextual gaps in order to
mobilise a positive reading experience in their young readers.

Literature for children has to tread a careful path between a need to be sufficiently referential
in its intertextual gap-filling so as not to lose its readers, and the need to leave enough
intertextual space and be sufficiently stylistically challenging to allow readers free
intertextual interplay. It is on the one hand formally conservative, yet it is charged with the
awesome responsibility of initiating young readers into the dominant literary, linguistic and
cultural codes of the home culture. On the other hand, it has seen the emergence of what we
now confidently call the ‘new young adult novel.’

A theory of intertextuality of children’s literature challenges readers and writers of children’s

literature to acknowledge the lost codes and practices and underlying discursive conventions
by which it functions and has been defined historically. It shows why theoretical practice is
so important to reading practice. It urges a different poetics of literary engagement in which
the young reader’s part in the process of meaning-making is legitimised by the theory itself
because it endorses and valorises their propensity for intertextual interplay. The texts
mentioned here act only as illustrative paradigms of the theory of intertextuality of children’s
literature in a cornucopia of other possible texts. Some of these texts, like so many others in
the field, have a metafictional dimension which causes readers to pay attention to their fabric,
to the devices of artifice in literature and to the textuality, as well as the actuality, of the
world to which they allude. The theory of intertextuality of children’s literature is a rich field
in which to engage young people’s awareness of the importance of the activity of making
intertextual links in the interpretive process. It brings them to a gradual understanding of how
they are being (and have been) textually constructed in and by this intertextual playground.
The texts of children’s literature are exciting sites on which to mobilise a child-reader
subjectivity that is intertextually aware and literarily competent.