Intertextuality does not Require Literary Dependence

When any two texts share similar language, imagery, or ideas, one natural question arises. Did the later author read or at least know the earlier work? This question of literary dependence has dominated literary discussions for many years. The search for direct borrowing, one author sitting with another's manuscript and deliberately copying or adapting it, has shaped how readers evaluate connections between texts. This framework, while sometimes valid, can be limiting. It assumes that meaningful relationships between texts must depend on direct reading and intentional reference, overlooking the many other ways that ideas, phrases, and concepts move across time and cultures.

Intertextuality, as a concept, was never meant to be confined to questions of direct literary borrowing. When the term was introduced into literary theory, it described something broader, since texts exist within a large network of cultural signals, traditions, and prior expressions that shape both their creation and their interpretation ^[1]. Meaning does not transfer directly from one text to another. Instead, it passes through the accumulated traditions of a culture, the pieces of language, rhythmic patterns, social conventions, and shared stories that writers absorb and readers bring to their reading. A text, in this view, is always a new combination of what came before, whether the author consciously intended those connections or not.

This understanding helps explain how ideas spread without the circulation of written texts. Stories, expressions, and ideas pass through generations of retelling, changing as communities adapt them to local circumstances. Social memory can easily extend back several centuries, and oral narratives can survive within cultural areas for even longer periods ^[2]. Cultural assimilation provides another pathway, as communities living alongside one another naturally absorb and adapt each other's expressions and concepts. Shared religious practices, common educational traditions, traveling merchants and diplomats, and the simple fact of human conversation all serve as vehicles for transmitting ideas across boundaries of time and space. A later author may employ language or imagery from an earlier tradition not because they read a particular text, but because that tradition had become part of the shared culture around them.

Reader-oriented approaches to intertextuality have rightly emphasized that meaning can emerge in the encounter between text and reader. A reader who recognizes a connection between two texts participates in creating meaning, and this interpretive activity has value regardless of what the original author intended ^[3]. The history of cultural transmission can help explain these connections. When readers find similarities between texts from the same cultural environment, from traditions known to have interacted, or from communities with documented shared practices, those parallels gain additional depth. The reader's perception of a connection may be validated not by proving direct literary dependence, but by recognizing the shared cultural currents that shaped both texts. In this way, attention to transmission pathways complements rather than competes with reader-oriented interpretation.

The study of connections between texts benefits from holding these insights together. Direct literary dependence remains one valid explanation for textual parallels, and careful criteria have been developed for identifying it ^[4]. But it is not the only explanation. Cultural memory, oral tradition, shared educational practices, and the broader flow of ideas within interconnected communities all provide historically grounded alternatives.