Since being coined by Julia Kristeva, the term 'intertextuality' has been defined and deployed in a variety of ways. Conceived in the revolutionary throes of 1960s Paris as a concept intrinsically linked with the antihumanist erasure of the author-figure, 'intertextuality' originally referred to a condition of all writing, a discursive field in which all texts are encompassed. Since then, however, the term has undergone a series of transformations that have ultimately facilitated its use in terms of a textual practice, employed by the very authors that were denied by the term's originators. If the two conceptions of intertextuality appear incommensurable, however, this appearance is belied by texts in which notions of intertextuality as both condition and practice are indelibly intertwined: in other words, by texts in which the conception of the general intertext is inscribed, articulated and performed by their own insistent and reflexive intertextual praxes. This thesis explores the writing of Paul Muldoon and W.G. Sebald in terms of this collision of seemingly incommensurable conceptions of intertextuality. It argues that each author's writing can be understood as a complex and self-reflexive inscription and negotiation of the tensions and paradoxes that emerge from the conflicting formations of intertextuality with which their texts are self-consciously engaged.