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
Results 1-5 of 56
... matter of “seamlessness,” and unimproved texts were frequently described as monstrous, patchwork, or unassimilated, suggesting that the evaluation of literary works depended upon precise definitions of textual Critical Inheritance 3.
... suggests, identified as literary. Historical and scientific texts, which included travel narratives and folklore, were considered by many in the period as forms of knowledge or learning rather than invention and were treated by some ...
... suggests how deeply invested late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers were in textual strategies of assimilation, absorption, and appropriation. While Romanticism has been traditionally associated with the values of ...
... suggests that the literary climate was often ruthlessly competitive. Francoise Meltzer and Marilyn Randall have argued that power and dominance are frequently at the heart of allegations of pla— giarism, and this is perhaps particularly ...
... suggests that this perspective on plagiarism reflects a broader eighteenth-century belief in the “inseparability of invention and imitation” (188), and the perception that an author could borrow from other texts in the process of ...
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 |