What do folks think about the move to claim literary intertextuality is fanfiction, e.g. that Mallory, Milton, Virgil, etc. were fanfic writers? Maybe it's the genre historian in me, but it seems that fanfic is a very specific cultural form that loses its useful specificity when applied so loosely.

I think it's more interesting to say that fan fiction is a form that freely admits its intertextuality (cultural as well as literary), in a way that more self-consciously literary works have been cautious about post-Romanticism, but which is common in older literature and very important in genre.

I think that's certainly true about what fanfic is doing uniquely with regard to intertextuality. And if I recall you make a similar argument in your book (which I recently cited at length in a discussion about Robert Jordan and "the value of iteration").

The book touches on this at various points - I found Colin Burrow's book on the older sense of imitation illuminating for thinking about how senses of appropriate relationality have changed over time. Will take a look at the Jordan post - I enjoyed your writing on Peake, who's one of my faves.