ABSTRACT
The term ‘intertextuality’ was introduced first into French criticism in the late 1960s by Julia Kristeva (1969) in her discussion and elaboration of Bakhtin’s principle of dialogism (see above, pp. 83-4). Kristeva argued that no text is ‘free’ of other texts; that the generic difference between communicative types-novels, letters, essays, poems, plays-is overridden by their dialogic, intertextual relationship. Intertextuality offers a useful model for an understanding of how the novel transformed and unsettled the relatively stable balance between the literary (poetic) and non-literary registers of Renaissance texts. As we saw in Part I, the novel is an all-inclusive framework of genres and linguistic styles. Anything made of language can appear in a novel. The narrator might offer us a facsimile of a signpost, a menu, a letter or a newspaper article; human thoughts, opinions and activities are mediated through dialogue, internal and external focalization and interior monologue.
