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The article aims at establishing criteria for identifying intended intertextuality as opposed to linguistic imitation. With examples from Niccolò Perotti's letters of dedication I discuss the rules – some written, others not - of the poetics of imitation that govern such borrowings and how they may be interpreted. Comparing Perotti's practice in these letters with his prescriptions for style in different letter genres in his De componendis epistolis I argue that Perotti uses intertextuality as a stylistic device by choosing a hypotext belonging to the same letter genre as the hypertext, his own letter.The article contains an edition of the letter of dedication to Perotti's treatise De metris.
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