The term inter textuality popularized especially by Julia Kristeva, is used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is made up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic, and literary conventions and procedures that are "always already" in place and constitute the discourse into which we are born".
In Kristeva's formulation, accordingly, any text is in fact an "inter text" - the site of an intersection of numberless other texts, and existing only through its relation to other texts.
