Although a parody is an imitation, not all imitations are parodies. There are in fact innumerable ways in which one work can depend on another (which hasn't stopped me from enumerating them on occasion) and most of them are not even faintly parodic. Here what I want to do is discuss those places where the line sort of blurs between things that are parodies and things that are, well . . . something else.
A parodist seeks not merely to imitate the style of the original, but to exaggerate its characteristics. A parody is in this sense more akin to a caricature than a portrait. The exaggeration may be as subtle as in the parodies of Max Beerbohm or James and Horace Smith, or as crude and over-the-top as Mel Brooks' take on Arthur Miller, while still remaining in the realm of parody. By the same token the target of a parody can be quite specific or fairly general without turning into something other than parody. Beerbohm's "The Feast" or the Rutles' "Good Times Roll" target specific works by Joseph Conrad ("The Lagoon") and the Beatles ("Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"); Jane Austin's Love and Friendship and Spinal Tap's "Heavy Duty" target genres; all are nonetheless parodies.
On the other hand consider "The Adventure of the Deptford Horror" by Adrian Conan Doyle. This heavy-handed imitation of his father's Sherlock Holmes stories is clearly intended seriously, and any laughter that the piece may provoke in the reader would probably not be appreciated by the author. A serious imitation--sometimes referred to as a "pastiche"--is not, in other words, a parody. At least not consciously.
As another example, what about "The Whist-Player's Soliloquy" by Carolyn Wells. This begins "To trump, or not to trump,--that is the question: Whether 't is better in this case to notice The leads and signals of outraged opponents, Or to force trumps against a suit of diamonds, And by opposing end them?" Is this in any sense an imitation of Shakespeare's style? Or is this rather the adaptation of his words to make some other point, perhaps topical or trivial? Such an adaptation is called a burlesque--and while burlesques have an ancient and honorable history, they aren't parodies.
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