intertextuality. A term implying that individual texts are inescapably related to other texts and that their meanings are correspondingly provisional and plural according to how these relations are discerned and highlighted. The term is associated with the 'linguistic turn' to structuralism, and with the insights of Derrida's deconstruction. A further brief theorisation occurs in an early essay by Julia Kristeva who saw in Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of dialogics and carnival the logic that 'any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.' Intertextuality implies, as here, a method of composition but essentially it has determined a way of reading; one which is neither confined to the supposedly immanent meaning of a given text nor seeks this meaning in an 'external' source. Instead, intertextuality promotes a lateral reading across the surface of different interwoven texts. As Roland Barthes wrote in 'The Death of the Author' which helped inaugurate this new orientation: 'We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning . . . but . . . a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.' It follows that: 'In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' . . . at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced.' Just how this 'multiplicity' of writing from 'innumerable' cultural discourses is understood will determine the kind of intertextual reading practised. Whether this proceeds according to a reading along designated dimensions or codes or in a less regimented but still precise manner marks the difference between a structuralist and poststructuralist understanding of intertextuality. The latter has been the more influential. There are significant differences all the same between poststructuralist models of intertextuality. Thus, where intertextuality is understood as the very condition of language and the production of meaning, there is in principle no restraint on the writings 'ranged' over and made relevant. The version of poststructuralism adopted by the Yale school of literary critics in the United States is frequently cited as having taken this route and is charged in English commentary particularly with the production of errant and self-indulgent readings. A more focused and it might be said 'centred' intertextual reading will follow the references, echoes and allusions of a given text situating it, for example, in a tissue of contemporary writings. Such is the approach characteristically adopted within new historicism. A third reading, still concerned with a given text, might detect and foreground marginal, self-contradictory, or repressed textual and ideological meanings. At this point an intertextual reading will join with other psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist or postcolonial approaches.