Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman Poetry

How can we explain the process by which a literary text refers to another text? Intertextuality has become a central concern of scholars and readers of Roman poetry; in this book, Lowell Edmunds proceeds from such fundamental concepts as author
text and reader, which he then applies to passages from Vergil, Horace, Ovid and Catullus. Edmunds combines close readings of poems with analysis of recent theoretical models to argue that allusion has no linguistic or semiotic basis: there is nothing in addition to the alluding words that causes the allusion or the reference to be made. Intertextuality is a matter of reading.