Women, Gods and Monsters (Note 17)

Volume 1, Number 2

Thaļs Morgan defines "intertextuality" as the relation of texts "to the larger system of signifying practices or uses of signs in culture" (1). Steven Cohan and Linda Shires, using the work of Julia Kristeva, define it as the "traces of culture and history -- fragments of other verbal and nonverbal texts . . . this mixture of signs, citations, and echoes" (50). See also Kristeva (66). Cohan and Shires also note that intertextuality is specifically not "a synonym for influence studies," or what Kristeva has labelled the "banal" study of sources (177, n.4).