Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic PeriodUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 M04 23 - 256 pages In a series of articles published in Tait's Magazine in 1834, Thomas DeQuincey catalogued four potential instances of plagiarism in the work of his friend and literary competitor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. DeQuincey's charges and the controversy they ignited have shaped readers' responses to the work of such writers as Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and John Clare ever since. But what did plagiarism mean some two hundred years ago in Britain? What was at stake when early nineteenth-century authors levied such charges against each other? How would matters change if we were to evaluate these writers by the standards of their own national moment? And what does our moral investment in plagiarism tell us about ourselves and about our relationship to the Romantic myth of authorship? |
From inside the book
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... first chapter of this book begins by considering the critical tradition that has privileged Romantic ideas of the autogenous author to the exclusion of models of coterie or collaborative authorship, and it explains why this tradition ...
... first accuser, Thomas DeQuincey. My particular interest here is in the critical description of Coleridge's borrowings as psychologically motivated, and, by rereading Romantic-period models of the unconscious, I consider how plagiarism ...
... first-century constructions of the charge. Indeed, while modern plagiarism is increasingly critiqued for the “Romantic” values that it privileges, this Romanticism has little in common with the actual ways in which writers in Georgian ...
... first-century constructions of the term in clear ways. Perhaps most importantly, questions of improvement and ownership of tone and style no longer operate either legally or rhetorically in the same manner. Because plagiarism represents ...
... first century is largely figured as a contest between the postmodernists and their detractors, traditionalists of a sort, who dismiss postmodernism as an exercise in moral relativism.6 The postmodern position, following from the early ...
Contents
1 | |
17 | |
3 Property and the Margins of Literary Print Culture | 49 |
Byron Originality and Aesthetic Plagiarism | 86 |
Travel Writing and the Defense of Modern Poetry | 122 |
Class Improvement and Enclosure | 144 |
Afterword | 182 |
Notes | 189 |
Bibliography | 211 |
Index | 227 |
Acknowledgments | 235 |