In introducing this new edition of Talking voices I have seen my task as threefold: first, to recontextualize the book in light of current theory; second, to survey related research that has been carried out since the book's original publication; and third, to indicate how my own research has built on and expanded the approach that I introduced and developed here. Addressing these tasks in that order, I begin with a discussion of the theoretical paradigm that this book would now be seen as part of: intertextuality. I discuss how the term has been used, as well as some of the research that has been done under its rubric. Second, I briefly survey research that has been done on repetition and dialogue or, as it is still frequently referred to, reported speech. (I have not come across work done on the topic of details.) Finally, I indicate how my own research has extended and further developed the approach to discourse introduced in this book; first, in a study building most directly upon it – comparison of an author's conversational and fictional accounts of the same incidents – and then in a series of papers analyzing family discourse.

Intertextuality

In recent years, a rich and varied body of research has been carried out under the rubric “intertextuality.” This term, as G. Allen (2000:5) notes in a book that takes the term as its title, “foregrounds notions of relationality, interconnectedness and interdependence in modern cultural life.”