Entertainment / Literature / Intra-Textual Meaning: Meaning that originates not within a work itself, but that originates in a related work in the same collection. For instance, in William Blake's Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, we find a poem called 'The Lamb' and a second poem called 'The Tiger.' Each poem can be read by itself and makes perfect sense in isolation. However, when we encounter them both within the larger collection, they echo ideas found in each other. The simplicity of imagery, innocent repetition, and child-like diction in 'The Lamb' serve as a sharp foil to the fear, doubt, and theological unease of 'The Tiger.' When the poetic speaker in 'The Tiger' asks, 'Did He who made the Lamb make Thee?' the reference invokes a deeper meaning by harkening outside 'The Tiger' itself to the meaning of the earlier poem, 'The Lamb,' in which the speaker explains to the lamb that God made it. The effect is to make the reader wonder how the kind and benevolent deity of 'The Lamb,' the sort of God that creates innocent children and puppies, can be the same deity that creates cruel, destructive forces in nature such as the tiger, a beast which seems to thrive on pain and fear.
Search Google for Intra-Textual Meaning:
Meaning Noun Synonyms: sense, import, content, signification, denotation, message, substance, gist
Meaning Adjective Synonyms: purport, implication, drift, spirit, connotation, significance, intention
MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Extra-Textual Meaning: Meaning that originates not in the text being read, but in another related text. The most common type of extra-textual meaning is an allusion, in which an author briefly refers to a character, event, MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Transfer Of Meaning: A change in meaning--often poetic in origin--in which a word's referent alters by a figure of speech such as a synecdoche, a metaphor, or a metonym. For instance, consider the phrase, 'all hands on de MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Fourfold Meaning: Another term for fourfold interpretation, this word refers to the medieval idea that every passage in the Bible can be interpreted according to at least one of four possible levels of meaning. The tex MORE