Reading the allegorical intertext

by Judith H. Anderson

"Judith H. Anderson conceives the intertext as a relation between or among texts that encompasses both Kristevan intertextuality and traditional relationships of influence, imitation, allusion, and citation. Like the Internet, the intertext is a state, or place, of potential expressed in ways ranging from deliberate emulation to linguistic free play. Relatedly, the intertext is also a convenient fiction that enables examination of individual agency and sociocultural determinism." "Literary allegory, in Anderson's view, is at once a mimetic form and a psychic one - a process of thinking that combines mind with matter, emblem with narrative, abstraction with history." "Anderson's book, the result of decades of teaching and writing about allegory, especially Spenserian allegory, will reorient thinking about fundamental critical issues and the landmark texts in which they play themselves out."--Jacket.