The metaphor of the tree—with its roots, trunk, and branches—has long dominated Western thinking about literary tradition. This arboreal model, as Deleuze and Guattari observed, imposes hierarchy, filiation, and unidirectional causality onto relationships that are actually multiple, lateral, and reciprocal. The history of influence studies reveals both the persistence of this model and the various attempts to escape its constraints.
The classical understanding of literary influence began not with anxiety but with reverence. Horace’s Ars Poetica presents tradition as both constraint and resource, advising poets to “win private rights to public themes.” This formulation acknowledges the commons of cultural material while celebrating individual transformation. The poet succeeds not by rejecting tradition but by inhabiting it distinctively.
Longinus extends this in On the Sublime through his concept of creative emulation. His question—”how perchance Homer would have said this very thing”—establishes influence as imaginative dialogue rather than passive reception. The sublime emerges through this agonistic encounter with greatness, where “this strife is good for mortals.” Yet even here, the relationship remains vertical: the great predecessor elevates the newcomer, who must struggle upward toward achievement.
Medieval and Renaissance theories maintained this reverential stance while elaborating the mechanics of creative transformation. Dante’s placement of Virgil as guide through Hell and Purgatory literalizes the mentor relationship, making explicit how predecessor texts provide both pathway and limitation—Virgil cannot enter Paradise, marking the boundary where imitation must yield to innovation.
Romanticism fundamentally disrupted this classical consensus by privileging originality über alles. The movement’s theoretical pronouncements—Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” Coleridge’s organic form, Keats’s negative capability—all emphasize individual genius over collective tradition. Yet the practice tells a different story. The Lyrical Ballads emerged from intense collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals provided not just material but often the very language William would incorporate into his poems. The Romantic circle around Byron, Shelley, and Mary Shelley demonstrates how creativity emerged through collective exchange rather than isolated inspiration.
This tension between theoretical individualism and practical collaboration reveals the inadequacy of the arboreal model. Influence flows not downward from predecessor to successor but circulates among contemporaries, across genders and genres, through networks of correspondence, conversation, and shared reading.
T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) marked a crucial theoretical advance by recognizing tradition as dynamic system rather than static inheritance. His insight that “the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new work of art among them” establishes bidirectional influence—new works change our understanding of past works. This temporal reversal disrupts linear causality: Homer is transformed by Joyce’s Ulysses as much as Joyce draws from Homer.
Yet Eliot maintains the monument metaphor, suggesting solidity and permanence even as he acknowledges modification. His “historical sense” still assumes a totality—”the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer”—that must be possessed through “great labour.” The model becomes more complex but remains fundamentally acquisitive: the poet must obtain tradition to contribute to it.
Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) psychologized literary relationships through his six revisionary ratios, from clinamen (swerve) to apophrades (return). His insight that “every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem” recognizes creative misprision as fundamental to literary production. Strong poets emerge through struggle with strong predecessors—an Oedipal drama of literary succession.
Bloom’s model captures something essential about competitive literary culture, particularly within the masculine poetic tradition he examines. Yet it assumes scarcity where there might be abundance, competition where there might be collaboration. The feminist responses to Bloom—by Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and others—revealed how this anxiety model reflects specifically masculine assumptions about creativity and authority.
Barthes’s “Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” dismantled the very foundations of influence studies by questioning the coherence of authorial identity itself. If the author is a function rather than an origin, if texts are tissues of quotations from “innumerable centres of culture,” then influence becomes untraceable—not a river flowing from source to mouth but an ocean of circulating discourse.
Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality attempts to theorize this condition, where every text exists as “a mosaic of quotations.” Yet even intertextuality often gets reduced to source-hunting, tracking allusions and references as if they were bilateral exchanges rather than multilateral emergence.
Bakhtin’s dialogism offers a more dynamic model, where every utterance responds to previous utterances and anticipates future responses. His concept of heteroglossia—the multiple voices within any single text—suggests that influence is always already plural, that texts speak in chorus rather than solo.
Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome provides the most radical alternative to arboreal tradition. Their principles—connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography, decalcomania—describe a model where “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.” Literary influence becomes not vertical descent but lateral proliferation, not filiation but alliance.
The rhizome has “no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” This captures how contemporary retellings relate to their sources—not as derivatives but as middles, as between-spaces where multiple texts, contexts, and possibilities converge. When Pat Barker writes The Silence of the Girls, she connects not just to Homer but to contemporary feminism, to war literature, to trauma studies—creating new pathways that didn’t exist before.
Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory extends this thinking by recognizing nonhuman actants in literary production. Texts, publishing technologies, platforms, algorithms—all participate in creating meaning. The influence of Homer on contemporary culture cannot be separated from the influence of translation software, of digital distribution, of search algorithms that determine what gets found and read.
Karen Barad’s agential realism pushes further, arguing that “phenomena or objects do not precede their interaction.” Texts and traditions are not separate entities that then influence each other; they emerge through their entanglement. The contemporary retelling doesn’t exist independently and then respond to Homer; it comes into being through that relationship, while simultaneously reconstituting what Homer means.
Rita Felski’s postcritical reading, drawing on Latour, proposes understanding texts as “actors in networks.” Rather than suspicious reading that seeks to unmask ideological influence, she advocates recognizing how texts make things happen, how they create possibilities rather than merely reflecting conditions. This shifts influence from a burden to be traced to an agency to be acknowledged.
Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis—making-with—provides perhaps the most generative model. Influence becomes collaboration across time, space, and species boundaries. We become-with the texts we read, write, and rewrite. The contemporary retelling doesn’t descend from Homer but makes-with Homer, creating new configurations that exceed both contemporary and classical elements.
These post-critical approaches reveal tradition not as inheritance but as ongoing creation, not as influence but as confluence. They prepare us to understand how contemporary retellings function: not as belated responses to authoritative origins but as active participants in making tradition, in creating the very ground they appear to stand on.