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. Anderson's intertext is allegorical because Spenser's
Faerie Queene is pivotal to her study and because allegory, understood
as continued or moving metaphor, encapsulates, even as it magnifies, the
process of signification. Her title signals the variousness of an
intertext extending from Chaucer through Shakespeare to Milton and the
breadth of allegory itself. Literary allegory, in Anderson's view, is at
once a mimetic form and a psychic one--a process thinking that combines
mind with matter, emblem with narrative, abstraction with history.
Anderson's first section focuses on relations between Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, including the role of
the narrator, the nature of the textual source, the dynamics of
influence, and the bearing of allegorical narrative on lyric vision. The
second centers on agency and cultural influence in a variety of
Spenserian and medieval texts. Allegorical form, a recurrent concern
throughout, becomes the pressing issue of section three. This section
treats plays and poems of Shakespeare and Milton and includes two
intertextually relevant essays on Spenser.
How Paradise Lost or Shakespeare's plays participate in allegorical form
is controversial. Spenser's experiments with allegory revise its form,
and this intervention is largely what Shakespeare and Milton find in his
poetry and develop. 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.
