A Genealogy of Intertextuality

This book traces intertextuality’s core ideas and emblematic tropes to their antecedents in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, philosophy, linguistics, and economics — as well as in highly allusive literary works of the same period — showing that the term emerged as a response to revolutions occurring in culture and literature from the 1850s. The ‘birth’ of intertextuality is often explained solely in relation to the most immediate context of its first appearance — namely, the ferment of political, literary, and academic agitation which dominated European culture in the 1960s. Baron shows that the formative contexts of its genesis are fascinatingly various, tracing the stages of intertextuality’s pre-history in such examples as Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Nietzsche’s proclamation of the ‘death of god,’ the suspension of the gold standard, and Saussure’s linguistics. Discussions are conducted through close readings of some of the key literary texts which registered these contemporary upheavals, and whose ways of negotiating their relations to other texts precipitated the need for a new term to replace the older paradigms of influence, source, allusion, and echo. This book maps a genealogy of intertextuality which will trace the theory’s core ideas and emblematic tropes to their antecedents in key cultural statements and events.

Scarlett Baron is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, UK.