Intertextuality in Practice

The books we’ve read, the films we’ve seen, the stories we’ve heard - and just as importantly the ones we haven’t – form an integral part of our identity. Recognising a reference to a text can result in feelings of pleasure, expertise and even smugness; being lost as to a reference’s possible significance can lead to alienation from a text or conversation. Intertextuality in Practice offers readers a cognitively-grounded framework for hands-on analysis of intertextuality, both in written texts and spoken discourse. The book offers a historical overview of existing research, highlighting that most of this work focuses on what intertextuality ‘is’ conceptually, rather than how it can be identified, described and analysed. Drawing on research from literary criticism, neuroscience, linguistics and sociology, this book proposes a cognitive stylistic approach, presenting the ‘narrative interrelation framework’ as a way of operationalising the concept of intertextuality to enable close practical analysis.