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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... style and voice and examines the charges of plagiarism brought against him in The Excursion in relation to the larger legal discourse of enclosure. Wordsworth's rhetorical investment in class metaphors is contrasted with the accusations ...
... style of one's own production. Most often, discussions of improvement rested upon this matter of “seamlessness,” and unimproved texts were frequently described as monstrous, patchwork, or unassimilated, suggesting that the evaluation of ...
... style was paramount, and seamlessness depended more upon stylistic qualities of voice and tone than upon other narrative elements. This critical emphasis was supported in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century law, which recognized style ...
... style no longer operate either legally or rhetorically in the same manner. Because plagiarism represents a statutory violation of property only insofar as it is related to the infringement of copyright or moral tort law, the legal ...
... style, and tone, elements that were legally and culturally recognized as elements of literary property in Georgian Britain. In the twentieth century, however, those particular protections no longer operated so powerfully, and Byron's ...
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 |